Holiday Flicks

This has nothing to do with travel or adventure, but while we were on the road visiting our families for the holidays I started to think about Christmases past. When I was a kid, there were shows we watched every year around this time. It was family tradition for us all to gather around the TV and watch Rudolph, the Grinch, Charlie Brown, Clark Griswold and all the others. When Christie and I met, she re-introduced me to the tradition of watching holiday flicks throughout the month of December. While we agree on greats like Christmas Vacation, she prefers those old classic movies--with moral fiber and bad acting--and those cheesy new pop-Christmas movies like Prancer. So here's a list of my top five movies to watch during the Christmas season:

5. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
4. Love, Actually
3. Die Hard 2
2. A Christmas Story
1. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation

Iguana

This green iguana was hanging out just outside our room at Villa Tortuga.

Hard Miles

When I talk about Hard Miles, I'm referring to the kind of travel that's more than some people care to experience. Hard Miles are the long trips, the tough drives and the adventures you have whether you planned on it or not. It's driving through the night, breaking down in unfamiliar places, losing your way, adventuring without an agenda. It's blowing a tire in the middle of the night miles from the next exit and finding your spare is flat, too. It's getting stopped by the border patrol because you took a wrong turn and almost ended up in Mexico, and now you're backtracking at 3am. It's when you're so tired you wake up in parking lots and don't know how you got there. Hard Miles are when your vehicle has 200,000 or 300,000 miles on the odometer and it shows in the dents and peeling paint and the duct tape holding things together. It's when your air conditioner goes out in the summer and your heater tanks in the winter. You feel the miles when you sleep in your vehicle and your buddy snores so loud that you give serious thought to smothering him. Or when you melt your brakes squeaking down a mountain at the end of a 12 hour drive.

There are rewards, though, for all our efforts. The stories alone make up for it all. So do the little gems one finds in unexpected stops along America's highways and backroads. Getting stranded in Roswell wasn't half bad. Neither was the time I fell asleep driving back from New Orleans and woke up in Mississippi. And that little pizzaria on the beach in Garza, Costa Rica, was a fun place to relax and have a drink.

Hard Miles are what we do. It's how we roll. This blog is for us to tell our stories to you. We might throw in some tips and useful information; but for the most part, it's just a collection of accounts and experiences for those who may be interested to read them.

Those who know Christie and I know that travel isn't just something we like to do. It's ingrained in us both and has been a major defining point in our lives and our relationship with each other. We met on one of my road trips and never looked back, even with three hundred miles of asphalt separating us. For two years we took turns making the trip to see each other. I think those were the hardest miles I've ever driven.

Now we're married, and it seems like as good a time as any for my partner-in-crime and I to start this blog and share some stories with you.

Enjoy.

-Mike