From Texas to Beyond

Local, Near and Far: Our journey of exploring the world.

Author: Rachel (Page 6 of 8)

Itineraries-Attraction & Restaurant Planning

May 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

So, you’ve got it in your head to take a trip. There are many factors to think about when planning…location, transportation, how far away is it from your home, what you’ll do, and time of year you’ll visit. While there are a host of things to think about as you plan, one of the main considerations is what will you do when you get there?

Taking into account your preferences for things you like to do is key. You may want to visit Prague like David and Rebekah, but you may want to sit in cafes or pubs and enjoy your reading list. For our family, we like a good mix of exploring, learning new things, trying local restaurants, and resting together.

Each new place you visit has something to offer–and typically you know ahead of time where you want to go because you’ve heard about one particular place or have a desire to visit. So you decide to visit, but what else are you going to do while you’re there? And where are you going to eat?

This is where all the fun research, daydreaming, and planning happens! I love this part of trip planning; making reservations, finding flights, etc., that’s all well and good, but the researching and figuring out what you will be doing when you visit a new place is almost as good as the trip itself. I enjoy it simply because it builds anticipation for the trip and excitement for whatever I’m about to experience. Today I’ll be sharing some of my favorite strategies for trip planning!

First, if I know someone where we are about to visit, I ask them for their favorite places to take friends and/or eat. If you know a local, that seems to be the best starting place. If I don’t know a local, I might consult friends who have visited or put a post on social media to see what suggestions others might have. Next, I use a combination of TripAdvisor, Groupon, Yelp, UrbanSpoon, and the city or state websites (most of which have websites dedicated specifically to attract visitors).

We love to find unique things to do, sometimes the timeline that we are planning to go on a trip coincides perfectly with a local festival or city event. Being able to find those gems and plan them into our trip is always a highlight.

As I said, I use a combination of tools to find things to do; reading reviews on TripAdvisor or Yelp and visiting attraction websites, is a great starting point. For attractions that seem interesting, I type up all the pertinent information: days & hours of operation, cost, ticket needed, is there a tour, parking, specific highlights of the attraction, or any specific notes from reviews such as best time of day to visit, etc. Once I’ve gathered all the relevant information, I  try to “organize” it into a loose itinerary.Our family likes the structure of planning what we’ll do each day but by gathering the extra information such as days & hours of operation we also have some flexibility.

I use a similar strategy, although using primarily Yelp to finding restaurants and places to eat–this includes any snacks or dessert options. Once we have a good idea of what restaurant options are available, we may plan to bring or make breakfast/lunch foods from home. Again, I try to gather relevant information such as address, days and hours of operation, as well as get an idea of the type of cuisine and cost.

Once I’ve gathered all the information about things to do and places to eat, I’ve found it most helpful to map everything. This is an extra step that I don’t always take, but have found it to be very helpful, especially if you’re trying to save on fuel and mileage on your car. For example, during our Madison trip, our hotel was on the far west side, the first night we got into Madison, we ate at a restaurant that was less than a couple miles away. It would have been a pain (and made us more hungry) to go all the way to downtown or the east side of Madison just to eat that day. So, we were purposeful in planning all of our east, central, and west side attractions and restaurant groupings.

What tools do you use to plan your trips?

Traveling with a Baby (0-6 Months)

May 19, 2015 / / 2 Comments

We hope you’ve enjoyed the last couple weeks of posts featuring Prague and the Czech Republic. We are taking a bit of a break the rest of this week to share a couple one-time posts and then will jump back in next week talking about Český Krumlov.

While we have yet to take Eva (who is now almost 6 months) on an international trip, we have taken her a couple different places overnight. Since everything seems to change with a baby/kids as they grow and develop, I wanted to try to catalog at each stage what things have been helpful for us as we travel with her. Before diving in, let me first apologize to readers who don’t have a child(ren) as this post is rather focused on travel with a kiddo.

From other parents we’ve talked to, traveling from 0-6 months really seems to be easy! I was slightly intimidated at first, but honestly, they need very little entertainment, and your main concerns are their basic needs. We’ve only taken a short (3-4 day) trip so far, but here’s what we learned:

Enjoying the Carseat

Enjoying the Carseat

Packing:  Lists are super helpful for me, so the week before we went on our trip I started a list of things we would need to pack. I did a couple different inventories of diapers, food, etc., and planned to run errands the day before (or earlier if for a longer trip) for anything we might need. It was helpful for me to do this ahead of time so that 1) I felt confident we had the things we would need, 2) I had time to pick up anything last minute, and 3) I had time to really think about if I would actually need all that was on the list originally.  Most of the packing was done the evening before or the day of.

Travel: Carseat. We’ve only done road trips with Eva thus far, so the essential for us is the carseat. She gets sick of it after awhile, but I also get sick of sitting in the car after a couple hours too. I brought several of her favorite little toys and switched them out when she became bored or slightly fussy which was helpful to distract her. We learned that it does not work for me to sit in the back seat with her–the fussiness becomes exacerbated because she can see me. Stroller. I originally thought we might bring her small stroller–this ended up being one of those things that we decided to punt. We knew we weren’t going to be doing a ton of walking or sightseeing, and we knew we would be with people who would want to hold her, so it didn’t really make sense to bring it. Carrier/Sling/Wrap. We have an Ergo, and I knew I would want it; when we were with a lot of people, it was perfect to be able to put her in the carrier so she could feel secure enough to sleep.

Feeding: Eva is formula fed, so we had to plan how that would all work out. Essentially we ended up portioning into baggies the amount of formula we would need for the number of bottles she would take during the trip. This was so nice because we didn’t have to worry about pre-mixing or keeping the pre-made bottles chilled.  It was also great because it meant we weren’t lugging around the container of formula, we would just load up 4 baggies and 4 clean bottles into the diaper bag and go. This plan did require us to take dish soap and a drying rack to clean used bottles, but we easily devised a system to wash the bottles at night. This is a category that will obviously change as Eva just started cereal and baby food. Another thing to note, when we took our trip, Eva wasn’t quite able to fit into a highchair, so most of the time we ended up holding her while we ate. It was slightly inconvenient, but by the next trip we take, she should be able to hold herself up better to be able to use them.

Eva2

At a restaurant in Austin

Sleeping: We have a pack n’ play which is super easy to set up and tear down. We used this in our hotel room and put her in a dark corner of the room. It worked out really well; partly because she is already fairly used to sleeping in a pack n’ play and partly because she was exhausted by the end of every day! For naps, most of the time she slept either in her carseat while driving or in the Ergo. She fell asleep a couple times in our arms, but since we were out and about, she never had the opportunity to take a nap in her pack n’ play.

I say all these things with a couple caveats: 1) you know yourself best 2) you know your kid best. What worked for me, may not work for you. What worked at this stage, probably won’t work at the next. And what worked for a 3 or 4 day trip probably won’t work for a 7 or 8 day trip.

When traveling with an infant, what helpful tips would you share?

April State of the Blog Report

May 7, 2015 / / 4 Comments

We’re back for our second installment of what we’re calling our State of the Blog Report. This month we’ll share our hard numbers and the topic we are going to address today is using social media.

Numbers

This month we’re showing a slightly different graphic for the overall traffic report. It shows the same information as the traffic report from last month, but also presented in a graph form and with a nifty little pie chart to show blog visitors. Check our first State of the Blog Report for the glossary of terms and to compare our numbers from last month. Generally, most numbers are down, which we are slightly disappointed by, but we also had (what we think was) a strong launch; all that to say we are still establishing a baseline. Hopefully we will continue to grow in readership for those who are actually interested in continuing to follow us as a travel blog.

Google Analytics Traffic Overview-April

Since the graph and pie charts are new, I want to explain them briefly. For the graph, the x axis  is the date, the y axis is the number of sessions (in royal blue) vs. the number of pageviews (in light blue). The graph shows us especially what days we saw a lot of hits on the blog. It also has helped us clue into some trends that we can compare to the WordPress stats to see what days we might be seeing more traffic. The pie chart is a nice little graphic to represent the percentage of new visitors vs. returning. It’s encouraging for us to see that we have a good mix of new and returning as we try to grow a foundation of returners while also hopefully start building new readership.

Google Analytics Traffic Source-April

For this month, Facebook and directly typing in the From Texas to Beyond URL were the most popular ways our blog was found. It is encouraging to see that Google also came up as a referrer.

WordPress Traffic Overview-April

If you’ll remember from last month, WordPress counts the stats differently, which is why the numbers don’t line up exactly with Google. The details provided through WordPress are really helpful as they reflect that typically we see a decline in traffic over the weekends (when we don’t typically post anything) and see a generous bounce up on Mondays.

What Worked…and What Didn’t

Obviously we’re still new to the blogging scene, but we’re also new to managing various social media outlets as bloggers. We are learning that social media is a great tool to be able to interact with readers while learning how to strike a balance between using the blog posts as a platform for interaction vs. social media.

We are currently active on several social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr. We’ve seen growing “Follows”, “Likes”, “Repins”, etc. from each of the various outlets, but aren’t exactly sure how to gauge what would be considered “successful”.  (Shameless plug, consider connecting with us on the links above or on the sidebar!) Since we started them at the same time as the blog, we don’t know what is a good measure for growth, how quickly we should see the growth, etc. This has definitely been a learning opportunity for us as we consider our current statistics and research what others have to say on this topic while also strategize ideas for additional growth.

It seems that the most responsive interaction we’ve received has been on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We manage those on a daily basis and try to respond as soon as we can to various people. That being said that also leaves us to wonder if we still should be engaging on Pinterest and Flickr. For now, we are hopeful to continue using all of these social media tools not only to engage with returning visitors but also to expand our visibility. As we gather more stats to see exactly what readers are looking for and how they connect, we’ll consider what we might need to eliminate (or add!).

For those who blog, do you also manage social media? What strategies would you share with us for managing those efficiently and effectively?

Experiencing Food as Culture

May 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Every Friday we take a break from our regular blogging schedule to allow the authors an opportunity to feature a certain topic they are passionate about. In the past you’ve read about art and studying abroad. Through this and other future posts we hope you’ll enjoy reading, we hope to share with you our personalities, passions, and interests on a more personal level.

Food is a necessity to human life. It sustains us physically, the sharing of food can foster community, and food can reflect culture. By far, one of my favorite things to experience when I go to a new place is the food. You can learn so much based on it: what is grown local, what is considered delicacy, how the food is eaten, who is your company, what flavors are emphasized or subtle, what social cues are in play, just to name a few.

Ethiopian Cuisine

Ethiopian Cuisine

I’ve had multiple experiences traveling abroad where I was served a very lavish meal by my hosts. They could barely afford the cost of the meal, but in those acts, it was communicated that hospitality was valued, that I was a honored guest, and that the food was the best of whatever it was that I was served. As I reflect on those experiences now, I think about how much the host culture revealed of itself in those instances. I might have been hesitant to eat whatever was served (not being a fan of insects) or be nervous about how the conversation might flow, but those things didn’t matter at all. What did matter was that I embraced what was provided and thus embraced my hosts and their culture. I’ve learned that there is value in being invited to dine with someone of a different culture, being served traditional food, and being willing to try something new even if it makes you uncomfortable.

Food from El Salvadore

Food from El Salvadore

Now this is where you interject and say “I’m not going abroad just for that” or “Is there a way to experience this close to home?”.  You’re right, I don’t just travel for food either…although it is usually a pretty high priority for Matt and I, we do love to sight see. And YES(!), if you live in a decently sized city, you don’t have to travel far to be able to experience different cuisine; you just need an adventurous appetite and/or a guide to help you along the way. Food allows you to explore the world without leaving your hometown; in a matter of a couple hours you can experience a different culture than your own just by tasting something new.

Indian rest 2Recently, Matt and I went out to eat with several of Matt’s co-workers. A majority of his co-workers are from India and they took us to an authentic (Southern) Indian restaurant. It was so fun and interesting to hear them speak about their food, what their favorites are, and explain how to eat it. I think they loved sharing it with us and they seemed appreciative that we were enthusiastic about trying a piece of their culture. Through this experience of eating together, we were able to learn so much from them about food, festivals that are celebrated, traditions, music, and values. It was an experience that I won’t soon forget and didn’t even require us to leave DFW!

I would strongly recommend getting out of your normal “box” in terms of cuisine–it will be a learning experience and a wonderful local way to experience food as culture.

indian rest 1

Marigold Kitchen & The Old Fashioned Restaurants

April 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

For us, it is an obvious choice–when we spend a couple days in a new city, we want to try to get a good mix of the unique and local favorite restaurants–no chain restaurants for us!

I already shared a little about the couple fun places we found in two previous posts–Baumgartner’s in Monroe, WI, and Hubbard Ave Diner in Middleton, WI, but the places I want to share today are right in the heart of downtown Madison.

If memory serves me correctly, we visited these two places on the same day, Marigold Kitchen for breakfast, and The Old Fashioned for dinner. In between dining at these two fantastic places, we hung out in downtown Madison visiting the Capitol, a couple museums, and enjoying the downtown area.

IMG_0496Marigold Kitchen is seated about a half block East of the Capitol on Pinckney Street, we saw that it was pretty popular among locals, so we thought we’d try it out. They only serve breakfast/brunch and lunch, and based on our plans for the day, we decided the night before that we should get there early. Upon entering, it was slightly confusing how the operation worked, but we took our cues from other patrons and got in line to order. After placing our order, we found a couple chairs at the counter. We both love omelettes–I opted for one with zucchini, roasted red peppers and goat cheese, while Matt chose one with chorizo and a corn relish. Major fail on my part for not snapping a picture, but Matt’s will have to suffice! The omelettes were served with “Marigold potatoes” and toast. Despite our attempt at getting there early, things seemed like they were starting to get chaotic; the busyness made for a loud environment, but the food was delicious, the servers were kind and helpful and we would definitely go back again!

The Old Fashioned is also on Pinckney Street, but it faces the Capitol, so if you’re lucky enough, you end up with a view! My word of IMG_0523caution about The Old Fashioned–it is a VERY popular place, be prepared to wait. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that it was so popular, so we ended up waiting for a very long time–at the time I don’t believe they took reservations, but that may have changed. So, what makes The Old Fashioned such a hotspot? They pride themselves on being quintessentially Wisconsin–their food sources are all from within the state and they love to share it with anyone who will listen. So, of course we had to start with a cheese plate–remember, WE’RE IN WISCONSIN! Matt ended up with a Sheboygan bratwurst with beer-batter cheese curds, and I straight up went for the carbs and had the Grilled Cheese with both Swiss and Cheddar (I probably had a side salad too out of guilt, but it was not memorable). Everything was absolutely delicious and aside from the wait, this was by far my favorite restaurant we went to during our trip.

After stuffing ourselves finishing our meal, we went for a nice long walk around the Capitol and surrounding area–what a great way to end our day!

 

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