The second ski trip of the 2023 season is in the books. This year has been lighter on ski trips. The reason is in part because I sold the Subaru Forester when we moved to San Francisco. The burden of renting a Tahoe-worthy vehicle is so heavy, that it often discourages what might have been a last minute ski trip. Partly work and the upkeep of a new home has kept me busier than I was last year.
It turns out the adorable aggressive owl (chouette 🇫🇷) we all love is a shameless, pay-to-win capitalistic bawd (Schlampe 🇩🇪). Duolingo updated their iconic language learning app earlier this year after some poorly executed A/B testing, an order from above to increase revenue no doubt, and almost no creative thinking. The app changed from a language learning structure of a preset path that offered three topics and lessons to choose from at any given time with a stronger emphasis on study materials (e.
January 17 Tuesday we snorkeled. I think I was bamboozled by local business practices, but we swam with the turtles regardless. We had initially planned to take a boat out to “Turtle Town” — a spot of water enclosed by a crescent moon-shaped island off the southwest coast of Maui. The night before, I got a call that the location was changed due to spotty conditions. As a PADI certified scuba diver, I was a bit skeptical.
Monday has been my favorite day of vacation so far. Catie has a knack for finding experiences on vacation more bespoke than the average TripAdvisor. The experiences usually are on TripAdvisor after all, but aren’t surfaced as well as the search-optimized snorkel trips. In this case, the travel blog The Blonde Abroad helped us find the O’o Farms Coffee and Brunch tour. About an hour from our resort in Ka’anapali, the four-ish acre farm was in the upcountry highlands, toward the center of Maui.
To celebrate the New Year, Catie and I continued revenge travelling. After landing back in San Francisco from Rome, Italy on January 1, we turned back around two weeks later to fly to Maui. This was a trip we intended to take in April of 2020 that was postponed over two years by the wrath of Covid on travel. As I’m typing this, we’re two days in and I’ve already seen enough to want to make this a regular January occurence.