Recently I was  looking for ways to honor one of my friends. He loved hiking, so my husband and I decided to complete a hike in his memory. While in previous years my husband and I hiked in Maine ,  Yosemite National Park , and even Greece , this wo uld be our first hike of 2022.  We scoured the mid-Atlantic region for a hike that would be worthy of our objective and decided upon Chimney Top in West Virginia. So we decided to drive to West Virginia after work on Friday, complete the hike Saturday morning, and drive back to Virginia afterwards.

Good morning! Today's post is about my trip to Manchester, Vermont, in October 2020 -- exactly 2 years ago today.

I honestly don't know why it's taken me so long to recap our 2020 trip to Maine because Maine is one of my favorite  states in the U.S. I grew up visiting my father's family in Island Falls during the summer, and during college I learned to snowboard at Sunday River ski resort in Newry.

As someone who once dreamed about being a Belle or Snow White face character at Disney's Magic Kingdom, it's probably no surprise that I'm an adult who still loves visiting theme parks. I was lucky to have grandparents who lived in Celebration , Florida (a community actually originally developed by Disney!) and to have lived in South Florida myself for a few years -- both of which meant that I was able to visit the theme parks multiple times. However, I hadn't been back to Orlando since 2016 (when one of my best friends had her bachelorette at MK and Universal!). So when my family planned a visit to Orlando over Halloween weekend 2021, I jumped at the chance to go.

In October 2021, I took my first trip to Greece, via my first cruise ever... hopefully the first of many more such trips! I've said before that because I didn't travel very much until 2017 or so, I like to hit many different places in one trip to see as much as possible. However, during  our vacation to Mexico , my husband realized how much he enjoyed being able to unpack and stay in one place, and he really wanted another vacation where we weren't constantly on the go, lugging suitcases. A cruise was our compromise -- we'd be able to visit multiple locations, but without having to pack and unpack or deal with all the time and costs involved with moving cities or countries. So we booked a week around the Greek islands on the Norwegian Jade -- and we loved  it!