I spent a decade of summers in my childhood camping in the Florida Keys with my family; the Keys were a mere eight hour drive from our home and our nine days of vacation were gloriously free as my parents kitted and fitted us five kids with fishing poles and snorkeling gear and reveled in the hours of kid-free time while we entertained ourselves. My memories of grilled dinners, sandy swimsuits, and campfire chess games are tinged with the honeyed orange rays of long summer days and faded at the …

If I could change one major thing about the US, nonpolitically  speaking, it would be our xenophobia…or maybe that’s too harsh.
Is it that we love ourselves and our own country so much we stay in our own borders?
We have an amazingly diverse culture, I’ll give us that. And a huge range of natural beauty – so that has to be factored in as well. Then there’s the cost of living – even for minimalists there’s a disparity in the cost of living versus earning ratio in the United States.
But there’s a great …

I’m going to shuck off my mantle of sophistication here on A Little Adrift to admit I’m a Harry Potter geek. When the book series first gained popularity I poo-pooed the trend and refused to join the masses in the Harry Potter craze. Then my best friend handed me book one with pointed instructions to “shut my face and just read the book;” at that point book three, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, had just come out.
Fast forward a mere three years and in 2003 I just so …

Travel Memories:
Two of the 12 Apostles on the Great Ocean Road

Pretty picture! I’ll admit, that mostly inspired this post. The ocean reminds of blown Murano glass in Venice , Italy and nature purposefully highlighted the scene with a sizable dose of redish-orange limestone (two colors opposite on the color-wheel and therefore complimentary :). My tour guide on the Great Ocean Road shared all kinds of facts and stories, with a handful of local lore thrown in for good measure, but it was this drive’s likeness to the another beautiful road …

Last fall I spent a day wandering the grounds of the Lady of the Lakes Renaissance Festival outside of Orlando, Florida. I’m habitually traveling in the spring every year and miss the one in my hometown, but I chanced upon one outside of Orlando last fall and the lure was too much to resist; I went and played for the day.
My previous participation in (and on going love with) Renaissance Festivals is one of those things that my friends tease me about even though I know they love me (it …

The Getty Center in Los Angeles sits sentinel on the faded, olive green hills to the west of Hollywood; a sprawling and artistic estate with glistening white marble construction framing the surrounding scenery with poetic picture frames built into the building’s architecture.

I so easily forget parts of my own home; as I travel endlessly in search of other cultures and experiences I forget the US has so much to offer (a fact a lot of my fellow Americans point out to me when I tell them I travel extensively overseas…I …

Travel Memories:
View from the Top of Muir Woods

My friend Jenn is a long-time friend from Florida who also made the move to Los Angeles after college. Our M.O. was long hikes through the mountains surrounding LA to rid ourselves of the city-angst. When I started talking about my RTW trip we road-tripped it up the California coast to San Francisco to test our travel style compatibility.
With Muir Woods so close to San Francisco we couldn’t pass up an opportunity to visit the park and see the redwood forest first hand. …

My recent whirlwind tour of the US with my job at Geeks Without Bounds gave me pause recently when I thought about all I have learned in the past six weeks. I marvel at the fact that I had never even heard of hacker and maker spaces less than six weeks ago and now I have visited 13 of these alternative communities in 11differenct US cities.
Hacker and maker spaces are pockets of intense community and they share a common interest, normally in the realm of technology and computers. And though …