Pandemic Anniversary Celebration
BY Ms. Vine
Monday June 22, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Travel
With our anniversary approaching and our travel plans abandoned, our thoughts turned to how we could recognize this milestone in a safe, special and smart way. Our experiment with a reduced travel budget and my years in grad school provided helpful prior experience with this. There’s not much Mr. Vine and I haven’t been through... Read More
Eating Our Way Through Costa Rica
BY Ms. Vine
Monday June 15, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Travel, Uncategorized
We’ve talked about where we stayed, how we got to Costa Rica, how we paid for the trip and how we got around once we were there. Now it’s time to share what made our vacation to Costa Rica so much fun. The activities we did and what we ate! Sometimes I talk about food... Read More
May 2020 Progress Update
BY Ms. Vine
Monday June 8, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Progress Update, Uncategorized
This month started and ended with the pandemic still affecting our daily lives. I continued to work remotely and Mr. Vine was recently called back to work. On the first weekend of May, we had some of the best weather we’ve seen all year. We took full advantage of this by hiking a lot, including... Read More
Wanderlust During a Global Pandemic
BY Ms. Vine
Monday June 1, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Travel, Uncategorized
This article describes some of the ways I’m coping with various travel restrictions in place during the pandemic in 2020. After the initial panic subsided during the pandemic this year, my wanderlust set in. Canceling our trip to Savannah scheduled to occur during the last week of May 2020 was one of the easiest, but... Read More
Adventures in car rentals: Costa Rica edition
BY Ms. Vine
Monday May 25, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Travel, Uncategorized
Our Costa Rica car rental was the low point of the trip. It was also an important reminder that if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. I won’t identify the rental company we used because I do not want to give them any publicity, even of the negative kind. To... Read More
April 2020 Progress Update
BY Ms. Vine
Monday May 18, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Progress Update, Uncategorized
What happened in April? I deviated from my normal custom of writing the monthly update in “real time.” Due to the pandemic and its attendant uncertainty, I successfully managed to avoid checking our investment balances from March 31 until April 30. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we’d picked up nice gains during April... Read More
Costa Rica: Where we stayed
BY Ms. Vine
Monday May 11, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Travel, Uncategorized
During our trip to Costa Rica we stayed at two separate hotels. The main reason for this was that I booked the main hotel long before we had plane tickets. Once we reviewed our air travel options, it made sense to fly to Liberia one day earlier. By this time, the hotel was fully booked... Read More
Traveling Vines turns Two
BY Ms. Vine
Monday April 27, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Lifestyle, Uncategorized
As with the first year, year two has been unremarkable in terms of blog metrics. For all of the reasons we talked about last year, we are fine with that. We enjoy the anonymity of our journey thus far. Each year offers the chance to reevaluate our continued desire to write here. Again we decided... Read More
Flight review: Roundtrip to LIR
BY Ms. Vine
Monday April 20, 2020 0 Comments Blog, Travel, Uncategorized
It’s time to get back to some travel talk. Even in the midst of a pandemic, I want to maintain the goal of writing at least two travel-related articles per month. Our Costa Rica vacation in February 2020 was a wonderful respite. Although the virus was on our radar, we were fortunate that the trip... Read More