This year our family’s over thirty years of vacationing at the grandparents’ condo in Miramar Beach comes to an end. When I got engaged to my husband Alan in 2002, I took my very first trip to Miramar Beach. Alan’s mom, who we call Nonna now, took me to her parents’ condo. We walked on the beach, ate out, went shopping, and had a great time. Nonna’s dad was a contractor. He built these condos in the 1970s. How cool […]
» Read more
Did you know 2024 year is an important year for the D.C. Cherry Blossom Festival? It is the last year before major sea wall renovations force the park service to take down over one hundred and fifty trees. Don’t worry. Trees will be re-planted. This legitimately needs to be done due to flooding on one side of the Tidal Basin. It isn’t the entire Tidal Basin that is flooding. It’s just the area on one side of the Thomas Jefferson […]
» Read more
Last year my cousin Amber sent me a VHS video clip of an interview she did with our Maw-Maw back in the 1990s. In this video, Maw-Maw told us there is a cabin in Tannehill State Park that once belonged to our great-great grandparents. Once I learned we have an ancestral home on display in Birmingham, Alabama, I knew we had to go check this out! My kids love it so much when I drag them out on these sorts […]
» Read more
On the last day before our flight out of Italy, Alan and I needed to get from halfway up the boot in Naples, down to the island boot tip of Sicily, to fly out of Naval Air Station Sigonella. Our whole vacation was built around our military space available flights. To learn more about flying to Italy using military space A, if you are active duty or retired, click here. All of the flights back to the U.S. were leaving […]
» Read more
If you follow both of my websites, you know that I did a top ten list for Gettingmyacttogether.com last week. I would never just shun my original website by not giving it a “Top 10 Most Popular” post too. Over the past couple of years, I have tried to take storiesofourboys.com into a more focused direction. Y’all know I started out blogging about parenting four boys, and my oldest son was absolutely not having it. He was right. You can […]
» Read more
Today we are talking about my favorite place in the world: the beach! We have a guest travel writer here to tell us all about different beach recommendations in the U.S. If the COVID-19 pandemic proved anything, it was the adventurous traveling spirit of the average American. As soon as draconian stay-at-home measures were lifted, people packed their suitcases, bought plane tickets for the entire family, and traveled. We not only go to the many stunning oceanfront properties in the […]
» Read more
If you are planning your trip to see the amazing city of Pompeii and the people frozen in time, I have a few helpful tips to share with you. Here is a city, buried by a volcano almost two thousand years ago. Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The entire city was covered in pumice and ash from the volcanic eruption, and it laid buried, largely undisturbed until the 17o0s. When people finally dug up the city, they found the […]
» Read more
we happened upon this beautiful church, in the center of the city. When we discovered that it is older than dirt and designed by Michelangelo
» Read more
The morning of our last day in Rome was supposed to be very straight forward. We had tickets to take the speed train right back to the U.S. Navy base in Napoli. We were staying outside of Rome, so we hired a cab to take us to the train station. We had a good breakfast at our Hampton Inn that morning, and a reasonable cab fare. All was going to according to plan. Then our taxi driver started to ask […]
» Read more
Our second day in Rome dawned on us a little later than we meant for it to. We knew we needed to get downtown early to stand in line for Vatican Museum tickets. You see, we did not plan far enough ahead to obtain tickets in advance. In order to see the famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, you must have Vatican Museum tickets. We were not about to leave Rome without seeing the Sistine Chapel. But did we see Vatican City? […]
» Read more
