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Nashville! - Retrospective travel blog

2026-06-12T18:00:00.000-06:00

We have done three trips to Nashville in the past three years, all of them in November/December and all of them basically just to see live concerts.

I tell people I love Nashville and it’s absolutely true, although it’s basically with the caveat that I’ve seen maybe 5% of Nashville (downtown and the area around Grand Ole Opry) So the tourist parts of Nashville are quite fun. The rest of the city that people actually live in? I have no idea. But that’s not the point.

Our first Nashville trip was the result of a couple of things - a variety of people we know saying how much fun they had in Nashville and we should go, and Food Network celebrity chef Maneet Chauhan having restaurants in the city.

So we booked ourselves a trip to Nashville, made reservations at The Mockingbird, and I also bought ourselves tickets to a charity dinner that Maneet was holding when we were there in the hopes we would meet her. Which we did. She’s absolutely lovely.

We also did our first trip to the Grand Ole Opry where we got an amazing show featuring Tricia Yearwood and Wynonna Judd, neither of which were announced when we basically bought our tickets blind. So that worked out well.

Our second Nashville trip was basically an in-and-out to see the Amy Grant/Vince Gill Christmas show. We’ve been Amy Grant fans since we were teens and had never seen her in concert. The show was at the Ryman Auditorium, and was just tremendous. The Ryman is such a fantastic venue for live music and this show was exactly what I needed at that point in my life.

Then last December we went back to Nashville to see The Birth of a King by Tommee Profitt live at the Bridgestone Arena. If you’re unfamiliar with TBOAK (as it’s commonly known), Tommee Profitt is a music producer who about five years ago created a cinematic reimagining of Christmas carols called The Birth of a King. He then did one live performance in Nashville that was filmed for YouTube (also released as a live album) and because popular enough that he then did two, one night sold out performances at the Grand Ole Opry. Those were so popular that last year he brought the show to Bridgestone Arena and sold it out.

To say I’m an enormous fan of TBOAK is an understatement. The live concert album/performance is an absolute masterpiece of musicianship and as someone who has sung in a worship band at church for about two decades now, I was blown away by the artistry, creativity and overall vision for this project. I listen to the live album year-round and Noel is literally one of the best things I've ever heard in my life. Seeing TBOAK in person became one of those bucket list items for me and the fact we got to see it live in its biggest setting yet was one of those moments in my life I’ll never forget. It was more than a concert - it was a worship experience unlike anything I’ve experienced and a glimpse of Heaven. So special. I’m not going to post clips because I don’t want to run into copyright issues, but spend 90 minutes listening to the TBOAK live show on your favourite streaming service. It’s worth it. (Also, if Tommee ever does a live performance of his new The Resurrection of a King album that he put out at Easter, we’ll be right back in Nashville for it.)

Beyond the specific shows we went to see, the main Broadway strip of Nashville has tons of bars that do live music pretty much all day and night without cover charges. So you can sit and listen to bands all day and enjoy without breaking the bank. We spent many an hour just bar hopping to listen to music and it’s always a good time. And downtown Nashville is full of great food options - you’ll never go hungry.

The only real downside of Nashville is getting there and back. There are basically no direct flights at the time of year we have gone and we’ve largely been stuck with red-eyes leaving after midnight and connecting first thing in the morning in Atlanta for a hopper over to Nashville; and then return flights leaving at 5 am back to Atlanta to then fly back to Edmonton. It’s a pretty long and tiring haul.

If you want more pix from our Nashville trips, I have story collections on my Instagram that show way more than what I’ve talked about here.

I’m told that my blog has been missed - seriously

2026-05-31T12:14:15.467-06:00

Apparently, I have actual fan(s) who have missed my travel blogs.

So in the interest of keeping my customer(s) happy, I will attempt to do more travel blogs as I travel (and maybe even do some retrospective ones of trips I did not blog about).

My wife and I are trying something different this spring when it comes to camping. Instead of just doing weekends, we’re hitting up a nearby provincial campground for some Wednesday-Sunday camping while I commute to and from the office on the work days. I was a little concerned that the length of the commute (at least an hour both ways, depending on traffic) would put a damper on the whole thing. But, really, it’s been fine. And even though the cut our first version of this short in (correct) anticipation of rain and came home Saturday instead of Sunday, it was quite fun. My wife stays at the campground during the day and goes on hikes and bakes and reads and I go to work and then come “home” and get to enjoy the park and being outside before going to bed.

Based on one week - a successful attempt at a mini vacation close to the city that doesn’t require me to take time off.

Still here

2025-07-20T18:19:00.002-06:00

Yeah, it's not cool to have a blog anymore. But this still exists. Waiting for the right moment.

Travel blog: A glorious and triumphant return to Las Vegas

2022-07-17T07:33:00.028-06:00

Welcome, friends. It's been a while, huh?

So, having survived this whole COVID ordeal for 2+ years, we decided to blow three years worth of travel budget in one summer. Which meant we had to return to Las Vegas.

We started at a new place at Harrah's called Walk On's, which is a Cajun sports bar. I got the gator wrap, which was quite tasty. Gator basically tastes like chicken, so this was nothing mind blowing in terms of exotic flavours, but I'm not going to a Cajun place and ordering a hamburger - I want something weird enough. My wife got the shrimp Po Boy. We both enjoyed our food.

We went back to Walk On's a couple of days later for breakfast, which for me was a pretty good chicken and waffles. It's hard to screw up chicken and waffles, and yet...

I also had the most disappointing chicken and waffles I've ever eaten. Which was surprising because it came from Chef Marcus Samuelsson's Streetbird Fried Chicken at Resorts World, the newest big hotel/casino on the strip. The chicken was under-seasoned, the waffle was... fine ... but the sweet and spicy syrup/sauce was neither sweet nor spicy and the end result was bland on bland on bland.

On the other hand...

The beef claypot rice from Geylang Claypot Rice was flavourful and terrific. I would absolutely get this again.

And the Peking Duck Tacos from Fuhu Shack was right up there with the best, most surprising dishes of my life. Highly recommend.

There were a bunch of other places at the Resorts World food hall we wanted to try but didn't get the chance this time around. The concept is cool - a bunch of little restaurants each representing a country's cuisine and they only serve 2 or 3 things. So the ordering and expediting is uncomplicated for both the customer and the restaurant and you can sample all kinds of places and not get overly stuffed. Think of it as a very upscale Heritage Festival (a reference Edmontonians will understand).

Somehow, I'd gone my entire life to this point without having cacio e pepe, a minimalist Italian dish that proves the point that great taste can be had without a billion different ingredients. We went back to Eataly at Park MGM for our last dinner prior to leaving and as soon as I saw this on the menu, I knew I had to have it. So good. We immediately recreated it when we got home.

Also terrific at Eataly was a focaccia with burrata.

And, of course, Gordon Ramsay Burger, remains the best hamburger I've ever eaten.

So, in the end, a very successful food trip to Vegas, which also involved a lot of walking, several days relaxing at the pool and temperatures that peaked at 41 C, which even for me is pretty warm. And, of course, we only got to about half the restaurants that were on my list, so we have a head start on the next trip, whenever that may be.

Travel Blog: Eating our way through Las Vegas

2019-09-28T12:31:00.002-06:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven't blogged in forever. I know. Twitter and Instagram are so much easier for instant blogging than Google's Blogger, which in 2019 still doesn't have a worthwhile mobile app, but that's a different issue.

Anyway, I didn't blog anything about our terrific trip to Portland earlier this year, but I figured I'd do something about our quick Vegas getaway, which was supposed to be a camping trip to the west coast, but life interfered and our plans had to change for various reasons, so... Vegas, baby.

The absolute highlight of our trip was Eataly, the new Italian market in the renovated Park MGM hotel. It's got a couple of sit-down restaurants, but it's mostly a bunch of lunch-counter market vendors selling a range of pizzas, pastas, sandwiches, as well as some fancier things like fish and meat. There's lots and lots of Italian wine and liqueurs if that appeals to you as well.

We were staying at the south end of the Strip, and so Eataly was very close by and we ended up going there a lot. Here's some of the amazing food we had.

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Back to Eataly one last time.

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 26, 2019 at 6:01pm PDT

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Back at Eataly for dinner

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 25, 2019 at 5:28pm PDT

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Lunch!

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 23, 2019 at 12:32pm PDT

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Breakfast

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 23, 2019 at 8:34am PDT

Other good food was found at Castle Fries at Excalibur, Bruxie's, the new Crack Shack, Mon Ami Gabi, and a new teppanyaki place called Chosun. All in all, great food and a fun trip.

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Castle fries!

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 22, 2019 at 8:51pm PDT

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Lunch at Crack Shack

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 24, 2019 at 11:46am PDT

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Dinner at Bruxie

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 22, 2019 at 8:52pm PDT

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Teppanyaki for dinner!

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 24, 2019 at 8:46pm PDT

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Breakfast

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Sep 27, 2019 at 12:45pm PDT

Yes, the best Google Gmail integration on Apple's iPhone comes from Microsoft

2019-02-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I migrated my entire personal email life to Gmail. That includes a couple of different Google accounts plus my primary email account that is set up on a domain that I own. It all comes to one unified inbox and it works, and I'm very happy with it. I can send and receive as my own custom domain, and can switch to the other accounts if I need to. But all the email comes to one inbox. Terrific.

It would be logical, then, that I would also use Gmail on my iPhone to maintain a high level of continuity. But the honest truth is that Gmail's iPhone app is merely fine and not great. And the best Gmail app on the iPhone actually Microsoft Outlook.

Yes, that's a little weird.

I switched back to the Gmail iOS app last week for an entire wweek to give it another try. And it mainly just frustrated me. It lacks features that virtually every other email app has (such as swipe one way on an email to archive, other way to delete). It has no calendar integration, even though Google Calendar is a thing on iOS. It has fewer document integration options than Outlook and other leading email apps. Outlook also has way more 3D Touch options on the iPhone than does the Gmail app.

Outlook is not only a better Gmail app on the iPhone, it's better at integrating Google's services on iPhone that Google.

(And don't get me started on how Apple's Mail app is utterly inferior...)

If you wish to read basically the same point on Twitter, start with this tweet and follow the thread. This was the inspiration for the blog post.

This story make me think about my experiment this week using @gmail as my iOS email app of choice.https://t.co/rXVDVH37qz
— Mike Jenkinson (@MikeJenkinson) February 3, 2019

Mexican getaway

2019-02-02T08:37:00.001-07:00

Seeing as this blog has slowly transitioned into more of a travel blog, here's some photos from our recent getaway to Mexico. We loved our resort. The weather was pretty good on the whole, and our friends from Winnipeg who joined us had a great time. A much needed getaway that didn't disappoint.

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Peacock on our deck

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Jan 11, 2019 at 5:11pm PST

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Underwater selfie

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Jan 15, 2019 at 5:44pm PST

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Flamingos.

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Jan 17, 2019 at 5:34pm PST

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Manta Ray. It was about 5 feet wide. Swam right past us.

A post shared by Mike Jenkinson (@mikejenkinson) on Jan 19, 2019 at 6:01pm PST

Las Vegas food blog! Fall 2018 edition

2018-12-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

My lovely wife and I hit up Las Vegas again last month for my 50th birthday. Naturally, there was a lot of good food - and a bit of not so good food.

New on our list of places to try was Nacho Daddy, which is attached to the Miracle Mile Shops but only accessible from the street (that we could tell). This was the Vegas Golden Knights nacho platter. Very tasty. They serve a variety of other Mexican food, but we'd have to go back to try it as all we ate was this giant platter of nachos.

Also new was Hash House a Go Go at the Linq. It was good and the portions were enormous so my wife and I ordered one meal and split it, which turned out to be the right choice. The biscuit, surprisingly, was nothing special. The egg scramble was pretty tasty, but not as good as...

Mon Ami Gabi at Paris (where we stayed), where we each had an amazing omelette, blistered tomatoes and some deliciously crunchy and buttery sour dough bread toast. An absolutely terrific breakfast that we enjoyed on the patio at 8:30 a.m. next to a heater.

And while the Paris hotel produced an amazing breakfast, the Burger Brasserie at the hotel produced a thoroughly mediocre dinner. The poutine didn't have nearly enough gravy and the sliders were merely OK. We got it to go and took it back to our room but I don't think the experience would have been any better had we eaten it in the restaurant.

On the other hand, Wolfgang Puck's Bar and Grill at MGM was absolutely the best meal of the trip and where we officially celebrated my birthday. The best steak I've ever had from a restaurant, some delicious Korean chicken wings and they gave us a decadent piece key lime cheesecake on the house for our dessert. One of the best meals of my life.

We also stopped at the Block 16 food hall at Cosmopolitan for food at one point and I went to Hattie B's for the Nashville hot chicken (although I didn't get the hot chicken but just normal chicken.) It was very good.

We also hit up a couple of our favourite places from previous trips, including Gordon Ramsay Fish and Chips, which remains excellent, and Giada's "Pronto" fast casual restaurant at Caesar's Palace. I love Pronto, but they raised their prices by about 40% since we were there in March, which resulted in two breakfast sandwiches and two medium coffees costing $50 US! Which is about $1.2 million Canadian. So while I love it, not so much that I'm paying $50 for two breakfast sandwiches and coffee

Survivor: Treasure Island - a concept pitch to CBS

2018-11-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

I came up with what I think is a cool concept for a new twist in Survivor that utilizes the Buffs - a staple of the game - as an actual strategic advantage in the game, if you can decipher the twist. I collated my thoughts into a Twitter moment.

⚡️ “SURVIVOR: TREASURE ISLAND concept pitch”https://t.co/Stckt0lrUB
— Mike Jenkinson (@MikeJenkinson) November 24, 2018

Our summer camper van adventures

2018-11-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of my blog (no one, shurely) know we bought a used camper van last year and gave up on our fun and wonderful but slightly wacky Rav4 car camping.

We did a Mediterranean cruise!

2018-11-03T10:45:00.000-06:00

Because I am nothing if not slothful when it comes to blogging, my wife and I took an absolutely wonderful Mediterranean cruise in the spring. It may have been the most fun and successful vacation we have ever taken, which is saying something because we have never had a bad trip.

We left from Barcelona and ended in Venice. In between we visited Monaco, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Athens and Croatia. The food and the scenery was all amazing and beautiful and absolutely lovely and I seriously have nothing to say about this trip. It was fantastic.

Here's a sample of the approximately 10 million photos we took.

#vanlife Devon Lion's Campground

2018-05-17T18:00:00.000-06:00

We successfully completed our first camping outing in our camper van last weekend out at the Devon Lion's Campground. Everything pretty much works fine. There's a couple of things we need to get the dealership to check, but nothing that brought the trip to a screeching halt.

My wife totally loved her kitchen and being able to cook inside. Having a bathroom inside is great, too. We rigged up a bed for our daughter with a few boards and a mattress that went on top of the captains chairs. It's small, but it worked as a way to sleep a third person in the vehicle.

And check out the fancy TV! There's a VCR behind the right side panel. No, really! We're planning to pull it all out and make it more storage.

Next trip out in the Camper Van will be Canada Day long weekend. We plan to take Thor.

The camper van!

2018-05-09T20:07:00.000-06:00

As previously noted, we traded in the car camping concept for an actual camper van. We picked it up from the dealership on the weekend, and after a surprise and unfortunate mechanical issue that was quickly rectified, we now have it at home and are prepping for a summer of adventure in it.

And while I'm excited about being able to do road trips in this, I was quite pleased to discover that my iPad Mini sits very nicely in the giant console between the two captains chairs and can function as our navigation and entertainment system.

Watch this blog for all the fun and adventure (and hopefully no more mechanical issues) all summer long!

(Disclaimer: Blog posts will come when I have access to a laptop or real computer as Google has made it nigh impossible to use Blogger on an iPhone.)

The Great Las Vegas Food Blog - Spring 2018 edition

2018-03-17T08:51:00.001-06:00

I went to Las Vegas with my lovely wife. We ate food. It was amazing. Here's the details:

So let's start off with the best thing we did there: have lunch at the brand new Hell's Kitchen restaurant on the grounds of Caesar's Palace. We booked reservations about six weeks before just after it opened. The lobster risotto was amazing. The brick pressed chicken was delicious. The beef Wellington was to die for. The sticky toffee pudding was a great cap to the meal. And we met Chef Michelle Tribble who won the most recent season of the reality TV show and who won the prize of being head chef at this new restaurant, who was very accomodating in the photograph request department. This was by far the most money I'd ever paid for a meal at a restaurant, but I can't say enough good things about it. Absolutely great food.

Bobby Flay's Burger Palace was also a hit! My wife had never eaten there before - I had once - and she loved it. The blue cheese bacon burger (above) is my second favourite burger in all of Vegas, right behind the Uber Cheeseburger at Gordon Ramsay Burger.

We had breakfast our first morning there at Pronto by Giada, which is her new fast casual restaurant at Caesar's Palace. This was outstanding. The breakfast sandwiches were so creative and tasty and the pastries were rich and decadent. We spent way too much money there, too, but it was so worth it. I'd go back there in a heartbeat.

There are tons of pizza joints up and down the strip. Our usual favourite, 800 Degrees Pizza, disappeared in the Monte Carlo renovation and so during a walk through the Linq Promenade, we came across Flour and Barley. We split a margherita pizza that was crunchy, saucy, cheesy and tasty. Very good and reasonably priced.

Another new restaurant I wanted to try was Black Tap Burgers. I ordered the Texas BBQ burger and my wife got a burger salad. She really enjoyed her meal. Mine was good, but I've had several burgers in Las Vegas better than this one. So I'd mark this as a slight disappointment, but it was still a good meal.

Rounding out our culinary adventures in Las Vegas was Tom's Urban, which I've been to before with mixed results. This was a success. My wife had the fish tacos, which she loved, and I had the cornmeal pancakes and crispy spicy chicken, which is their take on chicken and waffles. The pancake was nicely crisp on the edges and the chicken was really good. My only complaint was that the buffalo wing sauce they use on the chicken clashed with the maple syrup and it just became too many flavours. Next time I would order it without the buffalo wing sauce. But, how have I got this far in my life without having eaten a cornmeal pancake before?

Lamenting the loss of the paper boarding pass

2017-12-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

Being a tech geek, I suppose I should wildly cheer the completely unsurprising news that paper boarding passes at airports will soon be a thing of the past, and everyone will be ushered into the glorious new era of all-electronic boarding passes on our phones, in our electronic wallets and in our airline apps.

But there's a part of me that isn't cheering this news at all. I actually like paper boarding passes.

For starters, paper boarding passes almost always scan the first time at security and at the boarding gate. I can't tell you the number of times I've been in an airport security line and someone spends 30 seconds fiddling with the brightness screen on their smart phone so that their electronic boarding pass will scan.

Or that one time I saw a person try to repeatedly scan their boarding pass at security on their Apple Watch for what seemed like five hours (I'm sure it was 20 seconds, but it was 20 excruciating seconds) before the individual actually took off the watch to re-position it for the scanner and trying again. They succeeded. Finally. I vividly remember promising myself, "I will never be that person."

I've also encountered issues before trying to check in online in the US or overseas, necessitating me having to go to a check-in counter at an airport, where they dutifully print me a paper boarding pass anyway.

Not to mention that I have never been comfortable having security scan my iPhone for the boarding pass and then dropping my iPhone loose in the security bin to go through the X-ray gizmo. When I go through security, my iPhone is always securely tucked away in a deep zippered pocket of my carry-on or backpack.

Now maybe if electronic boarding passes evolved to being more like Apple Pay and I don't need to "scan" so much as just "put my phone near the security reader" and have my boarding pass authorized... that would be an improvement. But as of right now? I'll print out a boarding pass every day of the week, and then load the e-version on my iPhone purely as a backup.

There's another advantage to a paper boarding pass - they make great bookmarks for paperback books, while reading on the plane or at the pool.

Oh, yes, I still read paperbacks on vacation.

Camping in Arizona

2017-11-19T02:30:00.000-07:00

We spent a couple of weeks in Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon in early October, and I've been horribly delinquent in blogging about it. Needless to say, it was terrific. The Grand Canyon is beautiful beyond words, and there's lots of cool things to do around the Flagstaff area, including the Meteor Crater, the Petrified Forest, and the Lowell Observatory (which was an absolutely fantastic surprise). So here's a bunch of almost literally randomly chosen photos. Because I don't have hours to properly sort through them, and because everything we saw was spectacular.

Goodbye car camping

2017-11-18T15:55:00.001-07:00

Our car camping adventures have come to an end.

As fun as it was to sleep in the back of our Toyota RAV4 in campgrounds, KOAs and national parks on both sides of the border, our October trip to Arizona showed us the limitations of this method of camping.

For starters, we were refused entry to our first, week-long reservation due to the campground’s rules against car camping. That they hid on their website. And that their own telephone reservation desk was unaware of. That forced us to relocate and find a new place to stay for a week. It was unpleasant.

It was also cold, particularly in Grand Canyon at night. Too cold for our comfort and to the point we abandoned an overnight campground reservation at the end of our trip to get a hotel. And not having an onboard bathroom meant dehydrating ourselves after supper so we wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night.

Finally, taking a loaded down 4-cylinder vehicle with a roof carrier full of gear was too hard on the engine and transmission.

So we are done car camping.

And we are now camper van camping!

We purchased a very low mileage used camper van this month. The new van camping adventures start in 2018.

#ufc215 in #yeg

2017-09-10T10:12:00.001-06:00

Last night was UFC's first (and, let's be realistic, probably only) stop in Edmonton for a PPV that saw the main event collapse just over a day out from showtime, and another main card fight pulled a few weeks ago because of USADA.

Despite the changes, it was a really fun night - live UFC shows are almost always great. I was at the pretty terrible Winnipeg PPV show a few years ago and still enjoyed it because that was my first live UFC event.

Interesting personal trivia note: I've been to 4 live UFC shows, and this is the third time I've seen the UFC women's bantamweight title defended. I saw Rousey beat Tate in Vegas in 2013, I saw Nunes beat Rousey in Vegas earlier this year and last night Nunes successfully defended against Shevchenko.

Most of my thoughts on the show were captured on Twitter last night and this morning, so I present this TWITTER MOMENT for your reading pleasure.

⚡️ “#UFC215 in #yeg”https://t.co/fwbzyhn5Dy
— Mike Jenkinson (@MikeJenkinson) September 10, 2017

Car camping in our Toyota Rav4

2017-07-15T13:52:00.000-06:00

My wife and I booked a tenting trip to Yellowstone National Park last summer. We had never been there before and were really excited to go, but weren't thrilled that we were sleeping in a tent in bear country. We are fundamentally too cheap to buy a camper trailer, and our Toyota Rav4 doesn't have a big enough engine to pull anything larger than a ladybug anyway, so our options were pretty limited.

During a discussion of those limited options just weeks ahead of the Yellowstone trip, I Google'd "car camping Rav4" and discovered there's a whole sub-culture out there of people who have retrofitted their Rav4 vehicles to sleep in the back. We started devouring other people's blog posts and videos on the subject and quickly set about to lifehacking our car and our trip to suit our needs.

So we did a live beta test in Yellowstone and slept in our vehicle. We loved it. Sleeping in our Rav4 was quiet and dry. We didn't have to worry about wildlife, and with a roof-top carrier, we still had ample space to bring gear. Since that inaugural trip last summer, we've tweaked our setup a bit, and here's how we're doing it now.

Obviously, you start with your back seat down. We've also removed our tonneau cover for the time being. The back of our Rav4 doesn't lie completely flat - there's a bit of a lump where the hinge of the seat folds, and it slopes downward towards the back of the vehicle. So we needed to find a way to deal with the slope and make a more flat and level sleeping surface.

We decided to use those puzzle piece foam mats that you can buy for kids bedrooms, and are often used inside or outside tents to make a dry floor. This is five layers of them carefully cut out, put together and bound with some tape to keep them in one piece for inserting and removing. We call it our Reverse Wedge.

Up until our trip to Elk Island National Park on Canada Day weekend, this was our new base on which we added our four-inch foam sleeping mattress. It was really good, but it still didn't fully deal with the "lump" where the seats fold. So my lovely wife, who has been quite genius about all of this, decided one more layer was required.

So we added a piece of wood. Actually, this is tile board, but any thin flat particle board type of deal will work. So now we have a box spring of sorts on which we can place our mattress and sleeping bag.

The four-inch-thick foam mattress is a 44-inch wide twin that squishes just a bit around the wheel wells. We zip two sleeping bags together to make one big one.

And that's basically what it looks like when the sleeping bags and mattress are in place. Crawl in, shut the doors, lock the car, and go to sleep.

At night, our clothes and (depending on where we're camping) our cooler goes in the front seats, which are tilted forward a little bit to give us more headroom in the back.

My wife also sewed slip-over-pillowcase curtains for the windows that magnetize to the outer door frame. We use these at night to provide privacy. We can keep the windows unrolled a bit for air circulation and keep out insects. (The only downside to these window coverings is that they are not waterproof, so she also created an all-plastic version out of heavy duty garbage bags that keep out more water during rain storms. The air circulation isn't great, but then we just keep the car vents open instead. She's also created a daytime version of these out of mosquito netting that we're going to try on our next trip so we can roll down the windows all day at camp and keep air moving in the vehicle but keep the bugs out.)

The back gate window is covered on the inside with a black piece of fabric that velcros to the inside of the car. The tiny back side windows are covered the same way. The front window is covered with a store-bought interior sunshade.

Something new we are trying on our next trip is the addition of a shelf.

The tonneau cover can hold a little bit on its own, but we added another piece of the tile board and so now we can store a few things there at night while we sleep, like our phones, glasses, some toiletries and even tomorrow's clothes. I was hesitant about this because I thought my legs would hit it at night while sleeping, but we did a trial run in Elk Island without the board and it worked just fine.

There are tons of people on the Internet who have made themselves bed frames with built-in shelves, and places to cook and everything and that's all awesome. I applaud them for their ingenuity and thank them for the inspiration for what we did. Our setup is not fancy at all. It cost us very little money. But it works just great for us. And none of what we've done would have been possible without my wife, who has been amazing in her ingenuity and coming up with solutions.

It's not quite #VanLife, but it's pretty fun.

Brunch at Sugar bowl cafe

2017-05-07T07:48:00.002-06:00

It is with a certain amount of shame that I say I have lived in Edmonton since 1993, and yesterday was my first time at Sugar Bowl Cafe.

My younger daughter and I arrived around 10:50 a.m., after driving around a bit to find parking. We put our names on the list (not THAT list) and within 20 minutes we were seated.

There was no doubt going in that chicken and waffles was on our dining agenda, as it's one of our shared culinary delights. So younger daughter got the real chicken and waffles (that came with two fried chicken breasts) and I ordered the Belgian waffle. She gave me a chicken breast and I gave her some whipped cream. The maple butter is amazing, and the fried chicken breasts were quite good.

YUMMY!

So, yeah, if you're the other person in Edmonton who hasn't been there yet, I recommend it.

I ran today - no, really, it's a big deal!

2017-04-17T13:54:00.001-06:00

About four years ago, I was out at a social event with some friends from work. In a crowded restaurant, I lost my footing while standing on a raised ledge and fell a whole whopping three or four inches to the floor.

Searing pain when through my left calf, and it got really tight. At the end of the night, I hobbled back to my car, trying to walk off what I thought was the worst charley horse of my life.

The next day, I felt around my calf muscle, figured it was just tight and sore from being cramped, and took a few days off exercising.

When I got back into walking and running, my calf would get really sore really quickly. But I just assumed that this was, again, residual stuff from the charley horse.

Except that it never really went away. Finally, a full year later (because I'm a male - this is how we operate), I got tired of my calf cramping my style (geddit?) and inhibiting my speed and distance of my walking, hiking and running, and I went to my physiotherapist.

The conversation basically went like this:

HIM (feeling down my calf muscle): "Hmmm.. you have a vein of scar tissue there. You know you tore your calf, right? Pretty significantly, too."

ME: "Umm... no."

HIM: "How did you not know you tore your calf?"

ME: "I thought it was just a charley horse."

HIM: "Wasn't it really painful?"

ME: "Sure, but I'd never torn a muscle before. How am I supposed to know? It's not like there was any bruising."

HIM: "..."

So, I started physiotherapy for a torn-and-kind-of-healed calf muscle, and then I'd be fine, and then I'd reinjure it by pushing myself too hard, and then I'd go back to physiotherapy and it would get better, and then I'd do something stupid and reinjure it again, and this cycle continued for a while.

In the end, I figured I would be living the rest of my life with an almost always sore calf and that I'd never be able to run again.

Since joining the YMCA in January, and being far more diligent in actually doing my physiotherapy stretches to keep my calf feeling more normal, I've been slowly upping my walking speed to try to be able to burn more than, like, 1 calorie per hour. And also to prevent myself from being lapped on the track by snails.

Last week, I tentatively tried jogging. Or some kind of "not-quite-walking-but-no-person-in-the-world-would-call-it-jogging-more-like-shuffling." Then I tried running half a lap and walking half a lap. Then a full lap. Then two laps.

And then this morning - kilometre 3 in the image above - I ran a full kilometre non-stop.

My calf did not completely separate from my leg. My achilles tendon did not explode.

It felt great.

I've run 10 KM several times in my life. I've walked more than 40 KM in a day on vacation.

I've never been happier with a single kilometre in my life.

Google Maps needs more robust travel planning tools

2017-03-26T20:40:00.001-06:00

Planning a long road trip today, I kept becoming frustrated by the limitations of Google Maps when it comes to dealing with, well, long road trips.

Let me explain.

Say I want to drive from Edmonton to Newfoundland.

I plot the starting point and ending point into Google Maps and it tells me it will take 70 hours of driving time to get to St. John's.

Doing the math, that's five days of driving at 14 hours a day.

And here's where Google Maps falls short in its feature set.

What I would want Google Maps to do is take that five day road trip, and offer me options on how to break it up into approximate 14 hour driving segments each day, including giving me alternatives on cities/towns to sleep at night.

Because, really - if you were leaving Edmonton and driving east, would you know what's 14 hours from Edmonton? Winnipeg is 13 hours away. I know that because I've driven between Edmonton and Winnipeg probably a hundred times in the last 20 years. (But you may not know that if you don't have family in Winnipeg you visit all the time.)

And if I stay in Winnipeg at the end of Day 1, that means I have to then drive 15 hours from Winnipeg to ... where? ... on Day 2 to maintain my 14-hours-per-day average driving time to make it to St. John's on Day 5.

How do I find that out? What's 15 hours from Winnipeg? I can plug in names of Ontario cities and towns along the route and go at it via trial and error. And then I have to do that again on Day 3, to figure out what's about 14 hours from wherever I stopped in Ontario. And so on.

The specific problem I was dealing with today was similar to this. I was plotting out a 26 hour drive to the United States. We didn't want to do two 13-hour days because there was some urgency to arrive at our destination by a certain time on Day 2. So Day 1 needed to be about 16 hours long - maybe a little more.

Again - I had no clue what was 16 hours away from Edmonton on the US Interstate on which we'd be driving. So, again, I was throwing proverbial darts by plugging in cities into Google Maps to see if they were 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 hours away from Edmonton.

Fundamentally, I want Google Maps to figure out destination options for me based on the time parameter. If I'm doing a 26 hour trip over two days and I set my parameters as driving 16 hours on Day 1, I want Google Maps to churn out a list of cities/towns/villages within, say, 15.5 to 16.5 hours of my departure point along the route defined by the Point A to Point B 26-hour trip, so I can narrow my options on where I need to get a hotel.

(And while Google is upgrading its software, it can tell me where to get gas, too.)

In discussing this today on Twitter, @AlanSchtweetz even suggested that Google could implement a feature like I'm describing factoring in a user's previous travel history and hotel preferences.

@MikeJenkinson @googlecanada algorithm could factor in user's preferences/history of travel/hotel choices.
— AlanSchtweetz (@AlanSchtweetz) March 26, 2017

Which seems eminently reasonable to me given that Google is mining all my search history and emails for this kind of data anyway.

And if someone responds to this and tells me that this is buried somewhere in Google Map's menus or whatnot, I will HAPPILY and massively amend this post.

My kingdom for a mobile blogging app!

2017-03-24T06:45:00.001-06:00

In the same way that I occasionally remember that I have a blog, the good folks at Google occasionally remember that they run a blogging site.

Blogger was updated this week with some new themes, one of which you are looking at right now.

Which is cool.

But in 2017, when everyone lives on their phones, there is no official mobile app for Blogger from Google. Which makes it pretty much impossible to blog on your mobile device.

There used to be. (That's the screencap included here.) But it was pulled from the app store probably two years ago. Maybe more.

Not that the official Blogger app was awesome. It was the very definition of rudimentary and basic.

There are other third party Blogger-friendly apps out there, such as BlogPress, which I purchased ages ago and have used. But it hasn't been updated in more than a year. Other Blogger compatible apps I looked at in the app store have been updated even less frequently than that.

Sure, social media has largely killed blogging dead, which means there's no incentive for app developers to target a niche market. And Google has pushed Google+ as a quasi-blogging platform and social media network. If you search my blog, there have been times where I've used G+ as my primary blogging tool instead of Blogger. G+ is definitely more social than Blogger, but it's a poor blogging platform.

And I know people will tell me to move to WordPress. I may yet do that, as WordPress at least has a well developed mobile app.

But in the meantime, I can't help but think a company as massive as Google would have the resources to put together a terrific mobile app in a couple of days.

Blogging and my recent Buff obsession

2017-03-21T21:08:00.004-06:00

Yes, I have purchased yet another Buff hat. Which makes a total of four: two Pack Run Caps and two Run Cap Pros. And I got the matching UV Buff to go with it. I got these from Amazon via the United Kingdom, as this style isn't available in North America for some reason.

And, yes, I appear to have a sudden obsession with Buff, and there's a good reason for that - last year in Mexico, I burned my forehead.

Really badly. Like, I had a Klingon ridged forehead for a couple of days. You'll have to take my word for it. We deliberately didn't keep any photographic evidence because gross.

Blame a momentary lapse in judgment when I took my Tilley hat off so I could swim in the ocean, while completely forgetting I didn't have sunscreen on my head. One hour later, it was rIn Quj

The crazy thing was I had brought an old Survivor Buff along on the trip - one that I'd actually bought for my wife years and years ago as a fun souvenir because she's a fan of Survivor. I'd never really used it but for whatever reason packed it on our vacation. And I wore it all the time in the water after that.

Which led to me trying the Run Cap Pro last fall on another vacation and I absolutely fell in love with that hat (as I detailed in this blog entry). And since my wife and I do regular car camping road trips, I figure it's worthwhile to have a reasonable stock of Buff products around for all their regular uses. (New bonus use I've discovered: sleeping mask.)

And given that we travel fairly regularly and take lots of photos and have some fun adventures and occasionally an interesting life beyond travelling, I'm going to attempt to start blogging more regularly again. (Although if you want a far better adventure blog than mine, check out +Sarah Burns - and I'm not just saying that because her son married my daughter.)

Buff Pack Run Cap review (and bonus thoughts on Run Cap Pro)

2017-03-04T16:42:00.000-07:00

Buff Pack Run Cap in red (left), Buff Cap Pro (centre and right)

Every once in a while, I remember I have a blog... And I've edited this post at the bottom.

I've become a huge fan of the Buff Cap Pro, which is one of Buff's lesser known products (and one that I've never actually seen for retail sale anywhere). I took a flyer on ordering one from Buff's Canadian website last year and loved it so much I bought a second one on sale last month.

The Cap Pro is a terrific little hat. It's like wearing a small Buff on your head, but with a little sun visor attached to the front. They can be totally crunched up and packed tight in a pocket, are pretty breathable, and keep the sun from roasting my increasingly balding head.

While I wore a Tilley Hat for year and years, the Cap Pro has become my go-to vacation hat. It keeps the sun off my head and the sweat out of my eyes. And I can crumple it up and stick it in my pocket at restaurants and such. (Which is much, much harder to do with a Tilley Hat.)

And the Cap Pro is fully reversible and can be worn either side "in" or "out" with a different pattern on the other side.

The "B" side of the Buff Cap Pro

The "A" side of the Buff Cap Pro

The new Pack Run Cap just came out in Canada this month, and I immediately ordered one having read some very impressive pre-release reviews of it. There's a lot new techy blah-blah-blah about this hat that you can look up on your own about sweat wicking and all that good stuff. But in the meantime, NEW BUFF HAT!!!! AAAAHHHHHH!!!

Your humble host models the new Pack Run Cap

Given the colour choices available, I chose the funky red/black checkerboard combo colour over the rest (and I was a little sad that this blue/black colour wasn't available)

The hat arrived yesterday, and, to be fair for the point of the review, I haven't worn it while running or walking or doing anything other than trying it on and taking pictures. So these are pretty much first impressions...

The Pack Run Cap is just as crumpable as the Cap Pro, which is good. It has a slightly bigger brim, which is also good, as the small brim on the Cap Pro is my biggest minor peeve about it.

After that, the basic similarities between the two hats mostly end. The Pack Run Cap is constructed differently (Buff video with all the details) than the Cap Pro, and essentially has a sweat band inside. I look forward to seeing what kind of difference that makes when I get more use out of it. But the downside of it is that the Pack Run Cap is NOT reversible. (Which means the red/black design is the only way to wear it.)

The other major difference is that the Pack Run Cap fits a lot tighter on my head. The Cap Pro sits comfortably loose on my head but can be tightened in a stiff wind by an adjustable string at the back. The Pack Run Cap also has the string at the back, but the cap sits tight enough on my head that I don't think I'll need to use it even in a hurricane. I will be interested to see if the Pack Run Cap loosens up with regular use.

The inside of the Pack Run Cap

On the whole, then, I think the Pack Run Cap is going to be a great hat for hot, sweaty days during summer hiking and camping. I'd like to see more colour options on the hat, and Buff might want to loosen the fit a bit and make the hat a slightly larger size so that the drawstring can be used to tighten the hat.

MARCH 18 edit:

I wanted to update this post to provide more of an actual review given that I've now worn the Pack Run Cap to the gym a few times when doing the walking/running track and on a spin bike.

The cap does do a pretty good job of keeping the sweat from running into my eyes. I'd say it gets about 98% of it, which is better than the average baseball cap would do. An actual original Buff worn as a sweatband at the gym gets 100%, but outside, an original Buff can't keep the sun out of my eyes, so that's a worthwhile tradeoff.

Despite me saying that the Pack Run Cap fit tightly to my head, I'm finding I still need to cinch it even tighter when using it at the gym, which helps deal with the sweat. It's tremendously breathable and despite the front third being almost completely soaked with perspiration after a workout, it dries pretty quickly. And so far, it doesn't show any signs of getting salt stained from sweat, which is what always happens to ballcaps that I've used for the gym in the past.

So, yeah, I really like it. Given that I now have numerous different Buff caps, I think I'll keep the Pack Run Cap for indoor/outdoor workout kinds of activities, and my Cap Pro for more everyday outside stuff when the weather is warm.

Even better, I have ANOTHER Pack Run Cap arriving from overseas next week. Yeah, sometimes I'm a sucker for a cool pattern on something.