Hei There

Hello and greetings! Gosh it's been a long minute. 

Well folks, I see that the last time I posted on my travel blog was nearly two years ago. A lot of "adulting" has happened, but these past several months I've felt the push again to begin actively creating here because doing so does brings me so much true, proper joy, and I love blogging. It's a different approach to storytelling that to me seems more natural and less distracting than say using social media. With blogging you can be more direct, and intimate, and transparent.  You're at the helm. Appearance-wise, my blog's layout may look a bit different, and I decided to bring back the original RobbyAroundTheWorld.com header graphic at the top that I vaguely remember crafting before leaving to study abroad in Vietnam in winter 2011, when I first launched this exact blog. Staying true to my roots, and of course, leaning a bit into nostalgia.

As I enter into the latter half of my 30s (how the hell am I already 35?)...I'm realizing more and more how important, and quite frankly, healthy, it is to intentionally set aside time for creativity. Amidst balancing the roles of being a husband, dog dad, big brother, friend, home owner, ski patroller, automotive industry analyst on the clock, and my multitude of hobbies...sometimes it feels good to just pause, slow down, and create something, whether that be behind the lens of a camera or keyboard. I'm excited to start polishing (scrubbing the posts of typos, juvenile misspellings and grammar fumbles, touching up photos, etc.) and re-posting the some of my past adventures here and abroad. So, stay tuned.

In less than a week's time, my wife Brenna and I will be on a redeye flight to...Helsinki, Finland! We'll be exploring the country for the latter half of July. The recipe for this trip is right: Brenna herself is Finnish, we both are obsessed with The Moomins, and Finland has long been a bucket list item for us. I cannot wait to escape some of the everyday chaos and immerse myself in yet another Scandinavian country that's continually crowned one of the happiest in the world. Our plan is to spend time in the capital (Helsinki), then I've got a three-pedal Škoda Scala rented for us to dash away west and trace the coastline for cities and towns like Turku, Naantali, Tampere, before returning east along the northern shores of the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Finland toward historic Poorvoo and back to Helsinki for our final few days. 

Oh! And a couple of other notes:

• I recently bought Rick Steve's new autobiography, On the Hippie Trail, which was recently published in February, and I'm crazy stoked to start reading it on our long flights.
• If you're a fan of the late great Anthony Bourdain like I am, one of his earlier pieces, circa 2000, is now free to read via The New Yorker and it's expectedly, exceptionally brilliant.

Cheers, and be well.

Robby

My first solo backpacking trip taught me the importance of being prepared

During a recent overnighter at Newport State Park, I realized I've been backpacking now for almost a decade. Crazy. It's an outdoor pursuit brings me utmost happiness and adrenaline while exposing me to some of the most humbling terrain I otherwise never would have thought imagined. State parks and national parks, state forests and national forests, plus a few jaunts on a national scenic trail, I'm really glad I dove headfirst into backpacking in my early 20s and remained committed to it. Backpacking constantly challenges me physically, emotionally, and mentally. There's zero pressure to compete with anyone else but myself, and I cherish that.

My first time ever solo backpacking, the trip that got me hooked, was also a massive shit show of total unpreparedness. In early 2014, a month or so after receiving my first backpacking tent from my parents on Christmas, I was parked at a trailhead on the northeast border of Wisconsin and Michigan's upper peninsula. Ambitious and excited to use the new gear I had been slowly accumulating months prior, 23-year-old me wanted to escape north and spend a night in the backcountry of the Menominee River State Recreation Area. My plan was really simple: hike out and find a place to setup camp for a night alongside the rocky gorges of the Menominee River, hopefully reaching within Pemene Falls. In the fall, I had become just obsessed with backpacking and the idea of winter backpacking seemed so alluring.

But I was so unprepared. While my tent, a Eureka Taron 2 that I still use today, was suited for winter backpacking, the rest of my gear was not. Hyper-warm, down puffy jackets, insulating caps, trekking poles, elevated sleeping pads with appropriate R-values, and proper hiking boots hadn't even come across my amateur mindset. Within minutes of departing from the trailhead, I was already freezing and my feet wet, but I kept pushing ahead, blindsided by my eagerness. I had a basic survival gear to start a fire and a headlamp but no handheld satellite GPS, first aid kit, or two-way communication device should should things get dicey. I had snowshoes, really good, ones from MSR, but no poles. My outer layer was a green coat from Kohl's, likely on sale, and I wore my skiing snowpants over like jeans and long underwear. Again, a shit show. 

Perhaps the dumbest mistake I made was hilariously lugging a gallon-sized plastic jug of water from the grocery store with me out into the backcountry. It had frozen solid by the time I reached my site and rendered useless. Why I didn't primarily boil snow or filter water was beyond me. I eventually reached a clearing above the Menominee River to call home for the night just before sunset and I was exhausted. The heavy, extra-large North Face hiking daypack had been digging into my shoulders for a couple of hours as I hiked through knee-deep snow. Quickly setting up my tent and unfurling my new-to-me Alps Mountaineering sleeping bag that wasn't rated for temperatures below 30 degrees, I got a fire started to keep warm and have dinner. I don't recall what I ate, but it was probably awful.

This frozen landscape nestled between Michigan's UP and northern Wisconsin was breathtaking. It was so quiet, I remember, only the sounds of Pemene Falls's rumble, ice cracking in the river below, and the occasional distant howl of coyotes or wolves howling. It was a needed reset from the daily grind back home. As the sun dropped, the temperatures did too and I crawled into my tent. Without a footprint under my tent or a pad under my sleeping bag, the cold from the ground was immense. I tried to stuff other pieces of clothing and gear down in my sleeping bag, a trick I read online. At some point after midnight, I awoke not being able to move my feet much. It was miserable, and the thought of calling it quits and returning to the trailhead in the dark briefly crossed my mind. Fearing frostbite, I wrapped one of those cheap, thin reflective emergency blankets I bought form Feet Farm around my numbed feet. I regained movement, checked the outside temperature, which was __ degrees, and tried to fall back to sleep.

The next morning, under a bluebird sky, I exited my tent, unzipping the vestibule to a winter wonderland. I was happy, and amazed. After hiking around along the Menominee River and having breakfast (probably an uninspiring oatmeal pouch revived with hot water), I tore down my camp and returned to the trailhead. 

To say I learned a lot from my first solo backpacking trip would be an understatement. I was foolish, way underprepared with the wrong gear, and lacked proper risk awareness. It's something I can laugh about today and ensure to never repeat those failures in the future. After that overnighter up in the Menominee River State Recreation Area, I've since made it priority to invest in dedicated high-quality gear, along with continually researching and learning as much as humanly possible about backpacking. 

It's all part of the grand journey to better one's self.

Cheers,

Robby

Welcome to autumn

Hi there!

Fall has arrived in Wisconsin and it feels wonderful. The moody cloudy skies, cooler temperatures, and dramatic shorelines along the coast of Lake Michigan. Our warm morning mugs of coffee or tea just seem to taste better this time of year. Fall is a season of change, like how towering maples begin to drop their amber and crimson leaves in preparation for winter.

Changes are happening for my blog too. Here's a bit of an update. For a decade or so now I've taken to sharing stories about my various travels on a blogging platform that's seen different shapes and names. As I've progressed through my 20s and into my 30s (yikes), the purpose of my blog has changed as have the intentions of the content I create. For a minute or so my blog seemed too scattered, outdated, and complicated. Furthermore, in recent journeys beyond the walls of my Shorewood apartment, I began to realize I had really missed writing and diving behind the lens of my camera. Perhaps credit the fact that I've been hooked on a docuseries on Netflix I'd highly recommend called Tales by Light. 

Speaking of photography, that's a quick shot I grabbed of the moon rising over Colorado's Pikes Peak a few weeks back. The final image turned out surprisingly well for standing in a parking lot on our way home from dinner with a zoom lens but sans any tripod.

Anyways, I'm eager to start completely fresh and in the coming weeks plan to continue redesigning my blog so that it's best set up for what I want to do the most: authentic storytelling.  Stay tuned. Maybe amidst sharing new stories I'll re-edit and re-post a few of my older stories too. Who knows, but thanks for being here.

Cheers,

Robby

A midsummer backpacking overnighter at Newport State Park

I feel like I hit the jackpot one day on my lunch break. 

I randomly looked at campsites on the Wisconsin DNR's reservation website, eager for a weekend backpacking trip, and discovered there was an ultra rare opening at Newport State Park up in Door Count. Typically this never happens, as while it still remains an under-the-radar place to go backpacking in, Newport State Park is damn near impossible to secure a reservation during the peak season. This is a small part of the reason why in all the many times I've backpacked at my favorite patch of wilderness in Wisconsin it's been during the colder months (really though the winter solitude is just always breathtaking). Anyways, victory was in reach and I was able to successfully secure a reservation for just one Saturday night in late July. Not having to pack my winter backpacking gear and brave the oftentimes horrifically sub-zero temperatures, I was so ecstatic to explore Newport for the very first time outside during the heat of summer.

Early in the day Saturday, I loaded my pack and made the drive north in a glorious 2021 Chrysler Pacifica Plug-in Hybrid (one of the best vehicles on sale right now, in my opinion) to Newport State Park. When I arrived at 4:30 pm, a few slow hours of sunlight remained and temperatures were already 70 degrees warmer compared to the last time I had backpacked here seven months ago in January. There was no need for my 0-degree down sleeping bag, puffy, gloves, knit hat, or spikes attached to my hiking boots. I checked in at the park headquarters, filled up a few pouches of water, and headed off on the Monarch Trail that wove its way southeast through gorgeous prairies- a stark difference compared to Newport's craggy shorelines with scatterings of elaborate cedars or forests thick in pines and hemlocks. Below a jet blue sky, the prairies were alive and dotted with vibrant colorful wildflowers and grass.

Soon the trail connected with a another familiar path I've taken multiple times over the years, the Rowleys Bay trail. Pushing deeper into the woods, towards the southernmost point of the park, the daylight faded away behind the leafy canopies as I traced the shorelines leading east to Varney Point. I was amazed and rather humbled to see all of this cherished terrain and landscape free of snow, ice, and bareness. I passed a towering cedar tree shaped like a spade in a deck of cards, a sign that I was getting closer to site 9 on the very tip of Varney Point itself. But I had a couple more hours of daylight available and wanted to bag a few more miles so I continued on to the Ridge Trail. This rugged trail, another new one to me (likely because it disappears in the snow), skirts its way parallel along a bulging ridge of rock that's lined in soft fluffy green carpet moss that cued up memories of hikes I had done in Iceland, where carpet moss is found literally everywhere on the island.

At the intersection of the Newport Trail, I trekked south and southeast, returning towards the Varney Point area towards backcountry site 9. So in the handful of backpacking trips I've bagged at Newport since 2014, I've stayed at backcountry sites near Varney Point, Duck Bay, then towards Europe Bay and nearby Europe Lake at the northern boundary of the park, but backcountry site 9 was completely new to me. After 6.3 miles of hiking away from the trailhead, I arrived at a clearing on the point where I could pitch my Eureka 2 tent. With my tent setup, I scrambled down a path to the waters surrounding Varney Point. Clear, chilly, and clean. I splashed some on my face and looked out over the horizon north at the distant shorelines. I returned back to camp and found another overgrown path that led me to the end of peninsula, with postcard views in almost every direction. No other people and no developments, just pure Door County in the summer time. At 7:45 pm the golden hour light flooded the surface of Lake Michigan and the lone maple standing guard above my tent. I began boiling water and readied a dehydrated meal of exotic paid Thai from Mountain House along with a mug of tea. Today was also the first time I had gone backpacking since my bone graft surgery in March and I was definitely feeling a bit of exhaustion from working that still-recovering right knee. At dusk, I decided to call it a night, curl up in my tent, journal and pass out to the soundtrack of the lake's crashing waves and crickets singing.

I slept refreshingly well in ideal temperatures as temperatures dropped into the low 70s, maybe even high 60s. The moon shined bright like a spotlight down onto my tent. I awoke around 7:00 am and laid in my sleeping bag, relaxing and listening to the morning chorus of birds before unzipping the vestibule to prep for breakfast. I boiled water for a mug of tea and a batch of dehydrated milky strawberry granola oatmeal. I savored it slowly while reading a more few pages in Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire that I brought along for some inspiration and gritty wisdom. His writing always sparks my wanderlust ambitions. With breakfast done, I cleaned up my mess kit and skipped around on the rocky shoreline of Varney Point that I had all to myself. The summer sun continued making its gradual ascent into the sky and it already felt wonderfully hot outside. The lake water splashing in and out of the point's little pockets of coves was clear as glass, so I stripped down for a refreshing dip amidst the choking humidity. Given the heat's blaring presence, I dried off almost immediately after regaining my footing and turning back to my tent. My itinerary for Sunday was to travel north towards Europe Bay at the tip of Newport's 2,400 acres. This was a similar plan to what I had completed months prior on a winter backpacking overnighter, where I found refuge along the eastern shores of Europe Lake in the cedars.

Even amidst the middle of summer, the tranquility was much welcomed, seeing only a handful of other hikers and backpackers on the trails. Like my reflections yesterday, it was really neat to experience Newport's terrain and resident wildlife in a different season. Following the more rugged Sand Cove Trail and Duck Bay Trails which winded its way along the shoreline, I stumbled upon a window in the pines and cedars that overlooked the beach of Newport Bay and snapped a couple photos. Passing past Lynd Point, I followed the Europe Bay Trail north through the woods and eventually reached the Hotz Trail loop. I remember the dense moody green of the hemlocks in this neck of the park and it was a treat to be engulfed in them. The needles of hemlocks are noticeably darker green, flatter, and shorter than those of neighboring pines. Their cones are smaller too and bark redder once the outer layers of bark flake off.

Tallying up some miles, I decided to begin my return to the trailhead in hopes to get on the road and be back home by dusk's arrival. Scoring a backcountry site at my favorite state park on a whim was a surprise bit of luck. There's a case to be made about exploring new places...but I also strongly believe there's also a case to be made for returning to the places you love. That's why I'll never grow tired of Newport. There's still so much more begging to be explored here.

Enjoy a few more photos below.

Cheers,
Robby