Officially On The Road

Welcome to Today's Location and hello from Washington!

A quick stop in Macdoel, California to stretch our legs. Photo by Chris Flynn

Hi Friends, we’re excited to send out our first newsletter and to generally share what we’re up to as we travel the U.S. and internationally. We hope to share interesting places, recommendations, stories, and helpful tips and ideas for your own adventures.

If you’ve already subscribed, woohoo! We are so excited that you’re here.

We’ll send updates a few times a month and will share additional photos and info on Instagram. If you’d like to connect, you can email us at todayslocation@gmail.com.

Let’s back up a bit though, first, and tell you how we got here.

What We’re Up To

We have always loved traveling. It’s something that I grew up doing during childhood and my early adult years, and Chris has had the opportunity to do more of it, and develop the same passion, over the last 12+ years we’ve been together.

Every year when I’d look at how much vacation time I had we’d make a list and figure out how to maximize our time to travel and explore. We also made an effort, and really enjoyed, exploring the cities we were living in throughout the years - Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. It was just never enough time though to satisfy us.

After the last 2 years of doing very little travel - and missing a lot of our friends and family across the country, we decided to make some changes to allow us to have more time together and to do things we were really interested in exploring more.

I’m taking a break from the tech world, and Chris is scaling his photography work back, so we can spend most of our time traveling and with family and friends.

All of our travel is self-funded and is possible because we were fortunate enough to build up our savings over the last 10 years for something big. This is it - the big thing.

Based on our research and budget, we are planning to travel for the next 18 months to a mix of lower budget and higher budget countries that will balance each other out. Also - POINTS - credit card, airline, hotel, etc. These are really coming in handy and are making things a lot more affordable. Maybe we’ll do a post on this, and other helpful travel tools we’re using, in the future if you’re interested.

Lady in Red (Atwater Village, Los Angeles, California). Photo by Chris Flynn

Where We’re Going

We’re planning 3-6 months out to finalize plans for where we want to go, buying flights, etc. There are so many places we want to travel to, so we started by making a top/wish list of everywhere we really wanted to go. We then researched when the best weather is, and when the shoulder seasons are, and narrowed things down to make our plan from there.

• June-Aug: Los Angeles, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia

• Sept-Nov: Kauai (HI), northern and central California, and Mexico City

• Dec-Feb: Oaxaca (MX), Georgia (state), Egypt, and likely heading to SE Asia

For 2023, here are some of the other places we are interested in and are researching more: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Morocco, Portugal, Mallorca, Indonesia, Istanbul, Croatia, Greece, Taiwan, Rio de Janeiro, Peru, and New Zealand.

Q: Have you been to any of these places and want to upvote any of them? Are there other countries we should look into and add to the list?

Hiking in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Photo by Katherine Flynn

Conquer the Internet

The 50 Best Bars in North America list was just released and 15 of them are in places we’ll be traveling to this year! Can’t wait.

These Vintage Photos of Paris were really fun to look at - the photos range from 1885 to 1986.

Inventing Anna on Netflix is so so good. We are late to the game but recently watched a few episodes in our car while camping (because it was raining) and it was so hard to stop after two episodes.

32 Essential Restaurants in Oaxaca from Eater to add to your travel list.

Your Summer Plans

Q: What are your travel plans this summer? What are you most excited about?