The Travel Architect

Podcast episode 174 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

We’ve been gone more than usual in October (travel!) but we’ve found our way back to the pod in time for Halloween. The joke honors this haunted holiday, but the National Day is guilty of some unacceptable double dipping. The Travel Quiz is a two-fer: the Husband reveals the most recent ELC location, and then I perform a quick and queasy quiz based on facts gleaned from our recent trip to Philadelphia—a heady mix of history and pickled body parts. After that, the Bucket List activity upsets me. We then learn that refunds can be very unexpected and very delayed. The Husband’s update about airplanes is the perfect segue to my recently learned tidbits about holiday air travel, and then we jump into our recent travels: a fall camping trip in Bobbie and a long weekend in the City of Brotherly Love. Details, stories, and even a few useful tips await you, dear listener!

Scenes from the bike trail on our recent camping trip with Bobbie. (Shameless self-promotion, I know.)

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode:

PODCASTER’S NOTE: Greetings all. Apologies to WordPress followers for the re-release. When the Travel Architect went to listen to the ELC, she couldn’t access it on Apple Podcasts, even though it’s accessible via WordPress. We’re not sure what the technical difficulty is, but relaunching seems like the most reasonable first step in sorting it out.

Perhaps the greatest Enigmatic Location Conundrum of all is “where has this ultimate travel quiz been all this time?”. Well the ELC has been on vacation, travelling the world and finding clues that will twist the senses and entangle your reason. But now it’s back, and ready to deliver more cryptic clues than ever before!

The new installment is here for your confusion!

This next ELC is somewhat topical of late, and that can count as your sixth clue (you need to listen to hear the first five).

Give this a listen and a very serious think (no easy starts here):

Go ahead and grab your atlases, have a ponder and leave your answers in the replies below, or send directly to [email protected]. Good luck and thanks for playing this season of The Enigmatic Location Conundrum Mini-Pod.

Perhaps the greatest Enigmatic Location Conundrum of all is “where has this ultimate travel quiz been all this time?”. Well the ELC has been on vacation, travelling the world and finding clues that will twist the senses and entangle your reason. But now it’s back, and ready to deliver more cryptic clues than ever before!

The new installment is here for your confusion!

This next ELC is somewhat topical of late, and that can count as your sixth clue (you need to listen to hear the first five).

Give this a listen and a very serious think (no easy starts here):

Go ahead and grab your atlases, have a ponder and leave your answers in the replies below, or send directly to [email protected]. Good luck and thanks for playing this season of The Enigmatic Location Conundrum Mini-Pod.

Podcast episode 173 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

We’re back after a longer-than-planned absence, but we have our excuses at the ready, including the Husband’s knee surgery (which went off without a hitch—we were owed a win on the medical front). After taking time to celebrate the cooler, fall-like temps, I start us off with a joke that foreshadows the travel talk later in the episode. The National Day gives me a chance to tease the Husband about something he hoards, and the Travel Quiz makes me want to both eat and travel (which is all I ever want to do anyway). Next, the Bucket List activity, which combines both culture and nature, elicits two thumbs up. After some updates, in which I reveal the nickname I’ve given the older woman the Husband flirts with at the grocery store, we discuss my recent trip to The Land of Enchantment, highlighting just what’s so great and unique about New Mexico. The travel chat includes my stops not just in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but my several nights at a hot springs resort that has much more than hot springs, namely, puppies and chickens!! If you didn’t want to go to New Mexico before, you’ll want to visit after listening to this episode.

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode:

Podcast episode 172 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

We’re back from our first Bobbie camping trip, and while one of us is getting ready to travel, the other is getting ready to start the school year. The joke is in honor of that poor schmuck whose life is about to change, and the National Day is in honor of the joke. Next, the AI-suspicious Husband uses AI to generate the themeless but fun Travel Quiz. The Bucket List activity makes our eyes roll, and then we reveal the results of our s’mores-off. Still aglow with happy camper joy, we reminisce about the fun we had spending two nights in Bobbie and the great new local region we discovered, and throw in random dashes of travel trailer advice for good measure. We end with a little teaser of my upcoming trip and what it will take for the Husband to get the New Mexican products he’s tasked me with bringing home.

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode:

Podcast episode 171 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

We’re back from our trip, but not the trip you think, and not the trip we said we were taking. Alerted by a blog buddy about a wildfire that started right around the time we were hitting “publish” on our previous podcast, we spent 24-hours wringing our hands, after which I spent a half day fashioning a new trip faster than you can say airmiles. (The Willow Fire of which I speak is still burning and is human-caused, a serious tragedy for so many people and animals, and that’s just one of many Centennial State wildfires causing devastation this season.) The joke pays homage to this pivot and the National Day has started a challenge that we hope to report back on next time. The Travel Quiz shows how dearly you may pay for cheap air travel, and then we learn how I survived my second natural disaster in two months! We end with a segment we should have called Talkin’ Temecula, in which we detail the plusses and minuses of our last-minute trip. Here’s to rolling with the punches!

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode:

Podcast episode 170 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

As soon as the podcast ended, the Husband looked at me over his microphone and said in a wistful voice, I love it when we get lost in travel talk. And that’s what we did. So, after a lifted joke and a National Day for a fought-over fictional folk hero and a World Cup-themed Travel Quiz and a Bucket List destination with rare 100% agreement and several random updates, we talk travel: London, England (where the Husband just was), Leadville, Colorado (where we’ll soon be), and Venice, Italy (where we’ll be so far in the future we need binoculars to see it, and yet I’m already researching hotels), with themes of “you can’t cross the same stream twice” and “then and now” running through it. There’s also a call for advice from you Venice travel experts out there, so get typing!

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode:

Podcast episode 169 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

As promised, we’re back with part two of my recent trip to Sweden and Denmark. We switch things up a bit this week. I tell not one joke but three (though I’m the only one quaking with laughter) before the Husband messes up the National Day. Following that, I host a short Travel Quiz that pays homage to the natural disaster I survived in Denmark and which may also be helpful info for the seismophobic travelers among us. The Bucket List activity gets two thumbs way up, though one of the thumbs is under duress. After some listener comments, the Husband pulls out his Dullness Rating Scale and gets busy judging my Copenhagen activities, surprising me by adding “Interesting” and even “Cool” to his scale. I can practically hear you shaking up your travel plans to include Copenhagen. Good idea.

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode:

Podcast episode 168 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

Back home less than 48 hours from my first solo international sojourn, I set my jet lag temporarily to the side to engage with the Husband on the pod. We get cruising right away with the joke, and then geek out over the National Day. What follows is the shortest non-quiz Travel Quiz the Husband’s ever presented, all in an effort to get to the heart of the matter: Malmo, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark. In the end, we only have time to discuss Malmo, and, using his highly sophisticated Dullness Rating System, the Husband evaluates each of my travel activities for its level of ennui. My final activity begets much discussion, some argument, and ends with a live taste test dare. I hope you like this episode, because, having run out of time, we’re repeating the whole format next time!

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode:

Podcast episode 167 is available by clicking below.  It is also available on iTunes, Pocket Cast, and Spotify under the travel architect.

Nine weeks. That’s how long it’s been since our last pod. Everything has been MORE with the Husband’s illness: more hours in surgery than predicted, more nights in the hospital than planned, more visits to the ER, more recovery required, more time off work. I’m getting exhausted just describing it, but I want you to know why we’ve been absent for so long. We’ve been here, just caught in the web of illness and caretaking. Several times we’ve talked about podding; we even prepared to pod once or twice, but it was always thwarted by a downturn in the Husband’s condition. I hate to say, “We’re back,” because every time we think it’s over, something else goes wrong, but maybe, just maybe, we’ve turned a corner . . .

After a joke that reveals a cultural divide between the Husband and me, I present a National Day that isn’t particularly quirky, but instead brings about travel memories (and a short list of skills we think everyone should possess). The Travel Quiz reminds me to pack my rain slicker for Denmark (which I was going to do anyway), and then I turn the tables and administer a short quiz based on my Dictionary.com app. Then we recap some canceled travel and add another depressing instance, while hoping the Copenhagen trip doesn’t face the same fate. This brings us to another rare useful piece of travel advice that I forgot to mention last pod. I hope it won’t be another nine weeks before we meet again!

Previous blog posts referenced or hinted at in this episode: