Wanderland Workshops are here! Don’t miss our very first, a Travel in 2021 Workshop on Thursday, February 11th 2021, from 5-7PM EST! Where we’re at: I’m recapping my travels in 2020, including this criss-cross of my home country from January through February 2020.  It’s almost unimaginable in our current state of the world: In just three weeks […]

 

I can’t tell you how good it used to feel to touch back down in Albany after long stretches on the other side of the world. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in this case I’d been away from my home country for about eight months — though due to my crazy travel schedule, I […]

 

Time to dive back into roundups! Since I’m working my way through my black hole of content from September of 2016 to April of 2017, that means we’ve got roundups to catch up on as well. Apologies for the delay, but I suppose better is late than never… right? And to answer the inevitable questions, I […]

 

No matter what happens, I’ll still be me. That’s the mantra I calmed myself with in the days leading up to November 8, 2016. Overall, for me, it was a time filled with joy and excitement and pride. But occasionally, dark thoughts crept in. And when they did, it centered me to focus inward in those […]

 

Month 73 was meant to be my “breather” month in between two crazy periods of work travel this summer, which in retrospect is kind of funny because for the most part it wasn’t exactly relaxing — aside from two weeks in Martha’s Vineyard, in which even then there was a constant rotating door of guests coming […]

 

Philadelphia’s nickname might be The City of Brotherly Love, but since my little sister relocated there for a new job on the Governor of Pennsylvania’s reelection campaign, it’s been known to be as the City of Sisterly Love to me. And this year, after celebrating the Fourth of July with my family in Martha’s Vineyard, I […]

 

Our Father’s Day reunion weekend in Philly ended with a trip to a classic family activity — a trip to the zoo. And this zoo in particular is a historic destination as well. The Philadelphia Zoo is America’s first, having received a charter from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1859 and opening its gates fifteen years […]

 

Growing up, The Olympics referred not to an international gathering of athletes from around the world, but a gathering of Baackeses from around the East Coast. Once a year, we gathered for the Father’s Day Olympics, an elaborate weekend event involving custom t-shirts, scoreboards and prizes, and games like a egg-in-spoon relays and marshmallow eating contests. […]

 

Two whole months stateside! It sounds like a nice break, but in reality I was as on the go as ever trying to make the most of my time at “home” — and this is just a fraction of the full four and a half months I was in the US. A lot of what went […]

 

Greetings from somewhere between Philadelphia and New York! This was a very special week, the first time my three sisters and I have all been in the same place at once in six years. On Friday we came from far and wide — okay, from Rochester, Northamptom and Martha’s Vineyard, to be specific — to visit […]