With some sun.

Instead of in rainy Auckland.

Yes, Taupo is a good place indeed. Can’t wait to go back!

That’s why I’m very excited about my friend Tara’s new site Fab Girl Travel.

Tara has always traveled a lot for both work and pleasure. She started her blog a couple month’s ago and writes about both her travels and how to travel fabulously. Fab Girl Travel’s tagline is: The online travel guide for the fabulous girl of the go!

Obviously I’m her target market since I’m a girl who wants both to be fabulous and to travel frequently. I must say, so far I’m loving the site.

Some of my favorite posts on Fab Girl Travel so far include:

• Who is Fab Girl Travel?
• Fab Tip: Packing
• Fab Travel: The Luggage Debate
• Ask Fab Gabby: Inexpensive Solo Vacation

Those are just a few of the articles I’ve enjoyed. I’m excited to keep reading and see where Tara takes the site in the future. It has great potential to be an awesome niche travel resource. Make sure you check Fab Girl Travel out!

And this:

I can’t wait to go back to New Zealand! I can’t wait to get to the beach & ocean! I’m already planning a trip to the South Island in my head.

New Zealand’s South Island – Though I’m terrified of the earthquakes I still want to visit the South Island. Since it’s the closest and the cheapest to visit this will probably be our next trip besides going back to the US.

UK: Ireland, England, Scotland – I have always wanted to visit these places and I haven’t. When I lived in Europe I ran out of time and money. So they are still at the top of my list. This is a bigger trip that will happen at some point.

Fiji, Bali, Cook Islands – Basically I want to visit any of the islands near New Zealand. It’s silly to know that I now live near these islands I’ve always dreamed of visiting. The plane tickets aren’t too expensive so they will be visited in the next few years.

Hawaii – I’ve got a thing for islands, apparently. I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii and now that I’ve had a taste of a similar culture in New Zealand I can’t wait to visit Hawaii. We wanted to have a Hawaiian honeymoon but that won’t be happening as we plan to stay closer to home. Maybe for an anniversary?

Others that fall into the “would be nice to visit” category for me: Japan, Costa Rica, any South American country, Canada, and Cuba.

I would also like to take a few months at some point and drive across America slowly. I’ve driven across the country multiple times in all different directions, but each time it was a fast trip. I barely had time to check out anything. I would love to rent/buy an RV and just slowly explore (and eat) across the US. Sounds awesome.

Home for me is Tennessee.

Home for me will always be Tennessee.

A lot of people like to tell me home is where you are now. Home is where your heart is. Whatever. Home is where I say it is. Home is in Tennessee and always will be.

It’s not a specific place in Tennessee either. It could be Nashville or Memphis or somewhere out in the country. It really doesn’t matter in my mind because I love the whole state and my friends and family are scattered around it anyway. But when the word home pops into my mind I think of Tennessee. I always will.

Being an expat isn’t all it’s cracked up to be some days. Even on a beautiful island, with people you love, in a fun and friendly country. Sometimes you just think of your “home” and miss it. While I’m moving today that’s what I’m doing. I’m missing home.

I miss

• sweet tea
• my family
• hanging out with friends I’ve known for years
• good BBQ
• friendly neighbors
• southern accents
• hearing “y’all” and saying it without ridicule
• thunderstorms
• Chick Fil A
• the central location in the US
• four distinct seasons
• country music
• Memphis music
• Target
• Walmart
• low cost of living
• affordable real estate
• warm summer nights
• spring and fall
• my connection to the place
• a million more little things

It’s funny. When I first moved to West Tennessee as a 12 year old I cried for 2 days over it. I was so upset. And now I can’t imagine any place I’d rather be.  You can visit a lot of beautiful places in your lifetime and be awed by each one, but only a few will ever be “home.”

I miss Tennessee.

I love this idea. I almost wish I had a map like this for our place so I could track the places I’ve been.

But what’s more is the map reminds me that I want to travel. I’m itching for it. It’s only been a couple months since I moved to New Zealand but apparently a couple of months is all it takes for me to get restless. I want to take a trip somewhere. I want to visit a new place. I want to explore something new.

Places high on my list to visit?  Hawaii, Fiji, Bali, Samoa, Japan… oh hey look those are all islands! I guess I’ve got a thing for islands. I also want to finally visit Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland. Oh yes, and anything in Central or South America. And… well… yeah, I’ve got a long list.

I guess I’ll just settle for looking forward to the honeymoon next year, wherever we go for that trip. ;)

I think I forgot to post about it because it’s occurrence was accidental. Kepa and I went to visit friends in the Nashville area and the convenient meeting spot for dinner happened to be Franklin, so I got a chance to revisit all the places I knew as a child.

I grew up in Franklin, TN, and was 11 when we moved away. I had so many good memories of places there that I always held it in my mind as a utopia of sorts. And even though I’ve lived in Tennessee for over a decade since then I’d never made the trip back to my old spots. I’d even been to Franklin several times yet never made it across town to the area where I lived as a child.

It’s funny how you collect certain memories from your childhood and hang on to them. If you move on from a place your memories (and photos) are generally all that you have left.  After visiting Franklin and seeing all the places I used to play I realized my memories are quite deciving. That hill we used to ride our bikes down? It’s not nearly as steep as I remember. The walk from school to our apartment? It’s nowhere near as long as I thought it was. Memories are amazing, but memories from childhood are often distorted.

And then there is the fact that things change. That empty field we used so often it had dirt lines where we “ran the bases” of our baseball field? It’s full of green grass and trees now.

The school where I first learned my love for reading and writing and all things educational? Well, they still had the playground equipment I remember, even if there were a few new additions.

The strangest part about being back in a place you only knew as a child is that you feel like a child again as soon as you set foot there. Swinging on the swings, walking around the track, climbing on the playground stuff – I felt like I was a little kid again. All the memories rush back instead of just the selected few that always get replayed. Going back to your childhood places makes you feel like a child again. At least it did for me. I’m so glad I had this on my life list and crossed it off!

Since I left for Oregon a couple months ago I’ve traveled thousands of miles and gone through 15 states. I spent the last three weeks traveling and basically living out of my car on a road trip from Oregon to California to Texas to Louisiana to North Carolina to Tennessee.

I started in Salem, Oregon, where I was living for a month and a half with my good friend. From there I traveled to San Francisco and then Santa Monica to meet up with bloggers from the healthy living niche.

Venice Beach, CA

Emerald Isle, NC

I went to Los Angeles I picked up my boyfriend after he traveled to the US from New Zealand. We then went to Disneyland (see The Happy for the best photo ever from Disneyland), Vegas, Texas, New Orleans, Memphis, Nashville, and finally ended up on the east coast in North Carolina.

Seven Lessons Learned From A Cross Country Road Trip

1. Be flexible. Having a plan in place is a great idea, but make sure it’s not very rigid. Having some flexibility for new opportunities that might come up will make your trip more enjoyable. We had a tight schedule in certain places and it would have been nice to be more flexible and try more things.

2. Expect to spend more money than you budget. Unless you have a high budget, you probably will over spend. We had a very modest budget and definitely overspent in certain places. It’s hard to predict when gas will cost more or an unexpected but necessary expense presents itself.

3. Take care of your car carefully. If you are going on a roadtrip across the country you will be spending a lot of time in your car and putting a lot of miles on it. Getting your oil changed on schedule, having air in your tires – these things are important for your safety and for your car to be as efficient as possible. You might also want to consider getting AAA, which even if you don’t use gives you piece of mind on the off chance that anything might go wrong with your car.

4. People you’ve never met will be the best people to stay with. On our trip we stayed with a lot of bloggers to keep our expenses down and meet some of our readers (Kepa and I are both bloggers). Many of these stops were the most amazing and unforgettable experiences of the trip. The people we stayed with shared their homes and gave us more than we ever could have expected. If you get a chance, instead of staying in hotels stay with people you know or even those you’ve never met. Check out couchsurfing.org if you don’t know bloggers in a million places.

5. Explore as much as possible. See a random billboard on the interestate for something that looks promising? Get off and try it out. That’s how we found Lea’s Lunchroom in Louisiana, which gave me the best slice of apple pie I’d ever had. Don’t always stick with the standard stops – explore a little bit.

6.  It’s hard to be healthy. I’m a healthy living blogger who tries my hardest to eat healthy food on most days. On a road trip, however, it’s ridiculously hard. If you are trying to fully enjoy the roadtrip you want to try local dives and specialties, not chew on celery sticks. A long term road trip can definitely lead to weight gain when you combine the yummy food with sitting in a car for hours upon hours.

7.  It’s worth it. A cross country roadtrip was something I’ve wanted to do for years. It’s one of those things on my life list that I knew would stay on there until I did it. It was the most exciting, most fun, best relationship building, worthwhile experience. Road trips can turn out the other way though, so make sure whoever you go with is someone you really enjoy spending time with!

Those are a few things I learned in the past three weeks while traveling across the country. I’m finally back in Memphis now and I’m glad. My last three weeks in the United States will be filled with showing Kepa around Memphis and tying up lose ends before moving to New Zealand.

I finally have had time to relax and catch up on internet happenings while I’ve been gone. It was only one week of traveling, yet it was jam packed. We went from LA to Disneyland to Vegas to Dallas to New Orleans to Memphis in a week. That’s with the driving too. Quite crazy, right? And we still have to travel across the state of Tennessee and then North Carolina so we can visit the other coast and complete the road trip.

At some point I will sit down and blog about the entire trip and all the places we’ve been.  But let’s just say that on this trip I’ve found the happy.

Wheee!

Astoria from Astoria Column:

Beach in Oregon:

North Head Lighthouse in Cape Disappointment State Park, Washington: