The Olympics... and beyond

This past Monday marked 200 days until Tokyo 2020, which meant that it was 198 days until it's time to head around the world. As the number continued to tick down, I realized that it was time to do a little more planning in regards to the Olympic experience, so after I made all my newspaper deadlines, I spent some time online researching the cheapest flights to get to Tokyo in July. There are a lot of ways to get to Japan, but none of the flights were terribly inexpensive. Being as this is a self-funded trip (along with donations from some great people), my most important search function for the flight was to find the cheapest way to get there.  In this regard, there were a few flights that were right around the same price. The one that intrigued me the most was a flight on Hawaiian Airlines that went from Boston to Honolulu then on to Tokyo. Having never been to Hawaii, I thought this would be a great pit stop along the way. However, the layover was almost an entire day a...

This week, as the calendar turns to 2020, it’s time to look ahead and see just what a busy 2020 has in store. An exciting development that popped up last year was the chance to travel to Ireland with the University of New Hampshire Marching Band. This coming year marks the band’s 100 th anniversary and the director, who was a freshman during my senior year in the band, decided to plan a trip to Ireland and invited alumni to come along if they were interested. The first international trip (not counting Canada) I took in my life was also with the UNH Marching Band, when we traveled to Europe in late 2001-early 2002. I was also an alum at that point, but that trip was a blast and I am hoping the Ireland trip is much of the same. I’ll be making that trip in mid-March and will be in Ireland for the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin. A few weeks later, I will make a shorter trip, this time to Florida for a little spring training baseball. The Kingswood baseball team has made a n...