Grant and Luke

If we do Friday at 7 pm then we can fit in the 11 pm show, but we shouldn’t do that because the 11 pm show is offered on Saturday at 3 pm, and then we can do the 8 pm other show, but we have to check to see if it’s close to the theater and tickets aren’t crazy expensive. These logistical nightmares were our daily reality for the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday trip that Grant, Emily, and I took to New York City to see shows on Broadway. With none of us have been to NYC in a few years, it being a Holiday weekend (Veterans Day) and the baby still cooking— why not?

There is a map of the world that floats around in our house (currently in my office) that has pushpins of the places that I have been. One day, I hope to have a pushpin in each of the countries listed. To get one step closer to that goal—I found an area of the map that was barren…South Asia…and decided I wanted to go there. Simple as that. On a whim, I found a flight leaving Los Angeles that took me to Delhi, India and I booked it. These are my favorite trips because I have no idea what I am getting myself into until I am there. Life is far more interesting and enjoyable when you do things outside of your comfort zone.

This trip started with a bang. A literal one, unfortunately. We were leaving the house for LAX when a driver (either on his phone or not paying attention; or both) rear-ended us in the Mini Cooper Countryman. Not an ideal way to start a trip, but we got the bad out of the way early. The car is still drive-able, we filed a claim with the at-fault driver’s insurance and should get the repairs sorted out this week.

With things costing more and more, if you ever need a break— go to Austin. Not because the cost of living is more affordable than in California, but because everything is free. Going to a city and not having to spend any money will elevate that city’s rating in your mind. 

At the end of the trip, Grant sang the TLC hit song Waterfalls to me but rewrote the song. And it couldn’t be more fitting. 

(It’ll make sense later)

“Don’t go chasing Buffalo,

Please stick to the bison and the bears that you’re used too…

I know that your gonna wanna rely solely on the backup cam, but I wish you would turn your neck…”

Rust is an iron oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water. It also is formed when you haven’t traveled in a bit and are a bit slow on the pick-up.

Pop Quiz. Do you know where Copenhagen is? No prize, but pride awarded to those that do!

Truthfully, I had to look at a map to figure out where this place was located. I had a vague idea that it was somewhere in Europe, but got it confused with Belgium. For those that don’t know— you’re not alone clearly— it’s located right south of Sweden and north of Germany.

Wherever we go, Grant brings his stash of individually wrapped prunes to stay regular. On this trip…the prunes did not leave his bag as they were not necessary. We found out that green chilies are loaded with dietary fiber that helps in colon cleansing and keeping your bowel movements healthy. Fiber is vital for bulking up waste and raising its movement out of the system, preventing constipation. I share this because this may solve your mystery of bowel movement frequency that we experienced in New Mexico.

The end of 2022 may have just rung in, but the start of 2023 (and any year for that matters) really kicks off with Grant’s Birthday ExtravaGRANTza or ExtravaGAYza…it changes depending upon the activity we are doing. This year’s festivities were being housed in Dallas, Texas, which allowed some new faces to join us! Big thank you right off the bat to Wendy and Latisha for planning, prepping, keeping Grant grounded, and overall making this weekend a huge success! 

Ireland is a place where everyone seems to have the gift of gab. Some of the most distinguished and influential writers graced the streets of Dublin, but not every story deserves to be told. An innocuous event such as a man getting up out of bed and putting on his shoes can be turned into the most long-winded story or worse yet a song. Everywhere and everyone was a story for someone in Ireland. And in my short time there… I heard a lot of stories. It is only fair I share my story.

Oh, Canada! I know you are mocked all the time with South Park. I know your Prime Minister is Justin Trudeau. I love Canadian Bacon. You are big on maple syrup. You seem cold. And…that’s about it. I am sure if I really put my head to it that I can think of more trivial facts about Canada, but that's about all I knew. That is saying something considering both Grant and I have traveled to Vancouver, British Colombia. From that trip, I remember a draw bridge in the forest that freaked Emily out, driving like crazy to get to the Butchart Gardens, and nearly running over a homeless drug addict on a road that seemed longer than Downtown LA’s Skid Row. Needless to say— we needed to explore more of our Northern Neighbor.

Halloween is our favorite holiday, and yet, again we have canceled our Halloween party. Covid seems to have killed it officially, yet, we may pick it back up one of these years. We have so many decorations just collecting dust in the “dungeon” yet I don’t care enough to put them out. Grant put out a few so he does care more than I do. I think when we move to our forever home, we are going to be looking closely at the neighborhood to see if it cares about Halloween and Christmas decorations or not. Half the battle is moving from apathy to caring and I just haven’t found the enthusiasm I once had.

As I reflect on our epic excursion for Wendy and Dylan’s wedding in Cuernavaca, Mexico — I thought wow… “love” is universal in both languages. Then it dawned on me. No, in Spanish the word for love is not love, but amor. What? The ability to speak a different language is something that has alluded me, but fascinates me as well. As I did not know a lot of Spanish; I knew even less about a traditional Mexican wedding. What I learned… I need a lot more practice to hang!

The cities in the Pacific Northwest region have names that I just cannot say unless I pay attention. Coir D’Alene, Missoula, and Kalispell do not just roll off the tongue. To make it even more complicated according to Erica, the locals say “Boi’C not Boise.” Truthfully, I just made up names for all these places and everyone just went along with it.

With Florida, you go and you never know what you are going to experience. Each time we visit something new and unexpected happens. Last year, we got bad news about our surrogacy. On this trip, we were too hot to care about anything else happening.

The heart is a very fickle thing. Sometimes it wants one thing and then sometimes it wants something completely different. Put differently-- I sometimes want milk chocolate, while other times I want white chocolate. Strange. No rhyme or reason as to why my heart has these feelings, yet the heart knows what it wants in the end. Life sometimes presents difficult choices that fracture the heart. The more you struggle to try and put your heart back together the stronger the friction becomes. If the friction is not controlled, it can turn into a fire. A heart on fire burns slowly, blackens, and ruins without intervention. So, with this trip, the goal was to douse a heart on fire with an epic amount of water. An epic amount that could only be found at a waterpark.

Can you go to Best of San Diego this year? Nope. What about you? Nope. What about us? Nope, we are busy too. For some reason, we kept running into the word “no” when it came to going to Best of San Diego this year. We originally had a trip planned that would have caused us to say no, but due to a fortuitist change in plans (our flight changing), we were able to make it after all!

June of 2022 was a tough month for Grant and me. The theme of the month was — “just get through June and July will be better.” I would often find myself just repeating this phrase over and over and over. July 1st hit and our lives didn’t miraculously get better, but it slowly over time.

COVID is Over! Is it? No, but the world is moving on. This is the first flight of ours in over 2 years where masks were not required. It was great! Not that we were the best at wearing them in 2020 or 2021, but it is extremely nice not having to worry about an extra item to carry.

Aloha! “You never come out and visit us,” said Uncle Robert at my cousin Victoria’s wedding. Little did he know! We sure showed him. When the opportunity came up to visit friends in Hawaii, those words found their way from the dark recess of my brain to the forefront. Fine, let’s do it. We booked a flight on Hawaiian Airlines to visit Honolulu and Maui. Thank God we booked our flight when we did because soon after gas prices skyrocketed and our affordable flight became ridiculous!

“Señor Luke Martin…Señor Luke Martin…will you please come to the terminal gate. Señor Luke Martin please come to Gate 4.” When you hear this— you are in trouble!

Both Grant and I took Friday off. Friday was going to be a travel day and Saturday, Sunday, and 1/2 Day of Monday were going to be fun in Antigua, Guatemala. We had hotel, transportation, tours, reservations— you name it we had it ready to go for this trip. Besides Mexico, this would have been our first trip out of the US in nearly two years. I was more pumped about this trip than any other we have had in a while. Something different!

For Christmas, I got Grant a trip to the one place he has been dying to go, but that I always said “no” to. Wilmington, North Carolina. Or as Grant likes to call it, “Tree Hill, NC.” With the entire world to be able to see you may be wondering— why in the world Grant would want to go there? It is home to Screen Gems, which has produced some of his favorite TV shows including One Tree Hill and Dawson’s Creek as well as the latest Scream movies and many others.

What happens when you put friends of Grant on a plane, ship them to Denver for a three-day weekend, and Grant helps plan the weekend? The answer a really great time, full of laughter, food, and a lot of single dollar bills. On January 7th, Grant turned 36. Just for record-keeping purposes—I (Luke) am only 34 so this makes Grant 2 years older than me. He is now in his late 30’s and I am still pathetically clutching on to the fact that I am still able to consider myself in my early 30s. Grant wanted me to clarify that it will only be for two more months then I am officially old like him.

Christmas bells were not the only bells ringing the week before the 25th. My cousin, Victoria, the only girl in our cousin pool, promised Conner she would marry him. Where is Morgan City, Louisiana? Good question that I had to google myself. It’s about halfway between New Orleans and Lafayette. Which means—it is in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by swamps. This is where the groom was born and raised so it makes sense as a destination for the wedding.

Having a low attention span— Grant and I have to constantly be stimulated with something new and exciting. New, Now, Next. That is the reason why we love to go to New York City. Even when we have nothing officially planned— we can somehow do a little bit of research and map out an entire trip—during the trip.

This is how we choose our travel destinations. Grant randomly searches GoogleFlights and finds a spontaneous sale on a nonstop weekend flight to Chicago in November. He turns to Emily and me at dinner in Cafe Coyote (San Diego) and goes “want to go to Chicago? He waited a few seconds to make sure no one objected and the response was pretty quiet. Which was his queue to proceed with “I am going to book three flights.” Once again no major objections. And just like that…we are on an adventure to Chicago.

This post is way past due, but I figured…why not! Life has been crazy and we had a very up and down October. But it is still worth memorializing what happened as there were some really fun moments that we will want to remember.

Alaska was originally owned by Russia in the late 1800s as a fur trading colony. When the fur-trading dried up, Russia was saddled with a liability rather than an asset. Looking to dispose of this territory, Russia reached out to the US a fledgling country to acquire the land. At the time, Canada was not its own country and the territory was owned by Great Britain. Russia and Great Britain were at odds with one and other and there was no chance they would allow their greatest rival to gain more land. After acquiring Alaska, it sat dormant for quite a while until finally in 1959 it became a state.

As a planner, you do things in advance. You attempt to anticipate any problem and attempt to solve the problem before it originates. In heading to Mexico, we booked our flight, hotel, car rental, etc. — easy for us with as much as we travel. I did my homework and found what forms were necessary to avoid delays and we were off to Mexico without any issue.

Like clockwork, every year we find ourselves in New Braunfels, Texas to go to our favorite waterpark – Schlitterbahn. This is not like a traditional waterpark as it is a mega-park where the whole experience is divided into 3 sections that you can only connect to by bus. There seemed to have been more water in this area than in all of California!

COVID is still here, and while it was looking like things were turning around the Delta Varient is causing a bit of an uproar. Most of our friends have been vaccinated and feel comfortable being in social gatherings. Events are beginning to transpire again including our annual tradition of Best of San Diego and Cinespia’s Slumber Party.

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? The answer in our case is Yes, Yes, Yes, and let's add a few more stops just to make sure we hit everything possible. This elongated weekend had us departing on Friday night to Pittsburgh and making our way up to Buffalo to depart back home. Our style of hitting the highlights of the city and moving quickly to another proved valuable in a trip that had us visit— Pittsburgh, PA, Sandusky, OH, Cleveland, OH, Niagara Falls, NY, Buffalo, NY, and somehow as I type this stuck in Chicago, IL with a layover that seems to never want to end.

Some people have been sheltering in place for a year and are just now coming out of hibernation. For us, it has only been a month, but like standard Grant and Luke shenanigans we definitely packed in quite a bit. At this time, we have decided to pause the adoption process and have been riding that emotional roller coaster. We are looking at different options to pursue, but giving ourselves a break for a bit to figure out what we want to do.

A delayed birthday trip to New England sounded like an amazing way to ring in the huge milestone of turning 34 years old. You only turn that random age once so why not do something equally as random like visit Boston during a pandemic. After a 5.5 hour direct flight from San Diego to Boston, we were there to embrace whatever we could.

The United States is closed, but Florida has decided to secede from that idea. Upon landing in Florida we were greeted with hundreds if not thousands of happy travelers ready to enjoy the Disney World or the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference with keynote speaker Donald Trump. However, we were not in town for either of those events, but rather our friend’s (Debbie and Andrew) wedding.

If there was a gold medal for running late and finding a way to still make that event on time— we would be awarded the gold medal. While this is incredibly stressful, it does make an ordinary trip a lot more interesting, but maybe not for the right reasons.

What do you do when you are in a pandemic and have a three-day weekend? How about joining a family who is already on a road trip? Sounds reasonable.

Grant and I climbed on a flight Sunday morning for Phoenix where we met up with Erica and Ashley. They had rented an SUV and have been driving from San Diego to Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. With a car full of gear and a cat named Molly— they went cruising the highways in search of the notable and obscure sites.

With a light dusting of the white stuff falling on our faces last week in Dallas, Grant booked us a flight to Denver to get the heavier stuff. With Ripley’s health (dog) still a concern I didn’t want to be away to long. The 2-hour direct flight left San Diego at 6:15am and was set to return that same night at 11:30pm. The problem—after a tumultuous night of jockeying for position in bed with Ripley (he decided to play dirty and bark as well as kick me)...I didn’t want snow, I wanted sleep.

Having traveled enough we have learned a few tricks to get steals on flights. Grant’s favorite trick is to use Skiplagged- an app that looks at layovers rather than final destinations to see if there may be a discounted rate. A trip from San Diego to Dallas direct was $200, however, a trip from San Diego to Dallas to Denver was only $100. We grabbed the cheaper one and we’re off to Dallas to celebrate Grant’s 35th birthday. This is not our usual birthday celebration for him, but since Vegas or Palm Springs is out— this works! Plus, I have been told that we are doing a mid-year birthday celebration to make up for missed time celebrating with friends. Everyone save the date in July!