Someone recently asked us how we pack so light, so in preparation for that post, I thought I’d get everyone caught up on our travels since our last post.

• We did end up going to New Mexico over Thanksgiving 2021 to visit White Sands National Park where you get to sled down large sand hills, and while there we also made the obligatory stop in Roswell to hang out with some aliens.
• With travel still so expensive at the end of 2021, we decided to continue our National Park streak and did a holiday road trip to see more. We visited Hot Springs, Memphis, Mammoth Cave, New River Gorge, Shenandoah, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and Cuyahoga Valley.

2022 we called our “covid-catchup” year and we had four big adventures:

• We started the year with an amazing Spring Break in Portugal, visiting Lisbon, Porto, and a beach town west of Lisbon named Cascais.
• We found cheap airfare to Stockholm over the summer and turned it into a huge Nordic trip. We missed a connection and started in Iceland (the bonus country), and then continued on our planned trip of Stockholm (Sweden), Oslo, Flåm, and Bergen (Norway), Amsterdam (Holland), Helsinki (Finland), and back to Stockholm.
• Over Thanksgiving, we went with our extended family to Buenos Aires (Argentina), Colonia del Sacramento (Uruguay), Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) / Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil), and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Uruguay was a surprise favorite, and the Iguazú Falls blew us away!
• Lastly we added more National Park notches to our belts, this time around the south west. We started in Las Vegas and went to Zion, Bryce, with stops in Kanab Utah and Page Arizona, Monument Valley (amazing!), Aztec Ruins, ending in Taos, New Mexico on the east end of the trip. On the way back to Vegas, we stopped in Santa Fe, Petrified Forest, and of course the Grand Canyon.