April 2014: Our Traveling Lifestyle Resumes

The ski season ended on Sunday, April 20, 2014. We enjoyed the end of season skiing, socializing and then we packed up our new stuff from our new condo and resumed our traveling lifestyle. Our plan was to explore the USA from Vail, CO to the Bay Area in San Francisco for two months. We  drove with our bikes on the back of the car stopping for 2 or 3 days so we could bike and hike along the way. This is a map of our road trip route to California:

Audre (especially) loves spring road trips, with the flowering trees and the wildflowers. Before Bishop, the weather was cold but mostly sunny. In Bishop Dimitri was especially happy because it was 82° and he could finally thaw out.  After exploring the Bay Area around south and then north of San Francisco, we drove into San Francisco and spent the month of June there. We got as far north on the California Coast as Ft. Bragg and as far south as San Simeon. In the SF Bay Area, we rented a house in Rockridge, Oakland. At the end of June we stored the car and bikes and got on a plane for Kauai. We spent two months on the northeastern part of Kauai living out Dimitri's idée fixe that we have a house on the sand like he had in 1979 and '81.

At the end of August we flew from Hawaii to Seoul, South Korea. We have explored South Korea during the months of September and October. By the beginning of October we were getting road trip weary. As we have gotten older we seem less patient than we were in 1993 when we started traveling and everything was new, exciting and fun. We just may re-think our 6-month travel plan for 2015.

At the end of October we will fly back to San Francisco to retrieve our car. We'll beat it back to Vail at the beginning of November to luxuriate at our Four Seasons Vail Private Residence and spend the 2014-2015 ski season in Vail.

The highlights of our 2014 après ski season travel were 

• resuming our traveling lifestyle after 18 months, 
• discovering the Monterey Peninsula and how great it is (except for the weather),
• Audre's first drive along the Big Sur Coast,
• finally taking a weekend workshop at the Esalen Institute, 
• seeing friends and family in the San Francisco Bay Area,
• living out Dimitri's dream of having a house on the sand on Kauai's northeastern coast, 
• eating Haden mangos from Anahola, Kauai
• getting to know Korean food--on the ground.

To read about all of our 2014 travels, scroll down on this post and click on "Older Post". That will take you chronologically to the next description of our trip. (Yup, it's counter-intuitive.)