Let's go for it ...

Traveling is our passion and our profession. As longtime freelance journalists and authors of guidebooks, we have been traveling for many years, to be precise: our first trip to the United States was in 1982 and our 50th trip was last fall (to the Dakotas). Always big fans, we became more and more enamored with America in the course of our professional lives. We regularly visit three or four times and spend up to three months a year there. It's almost always for business – to do research for guidebooks and articles – but once in a while we squeeze in a visit to friends. This serves to compensate for the stressful hustle and bustle of our busy schedules.

Traveling can get exhausting (the older we get, the more). Long flights and jet lag are annoying and full itineraries, sometimes from early morning to late evening, stressful. We can be on the road for weeks, often staying at a different place each day with long distances to cover in between stops. The perpetual smalltalk, smiling and showing interest gets more difficult the longer the day gets. Nevertheless, each time we're back home it's not long before we get cabin fever again (especially in winter when we can't enjoy our garden).

Well, our next trip is upon us and it'll be the longest one yet – nearly 7 weeks in total! Our good friend Dom, a quintessential Brooklynite from Bensonhurst, did a good job of convincing us that we really ought to create a blog. To make it easier for our friends to keep tabs on our travels and adventures and, also, to keep an online journal for ourselves, we decided to create this travel blog. Since many of our friends live in the States, the blog will be in English.

As we are newbies at this and not much involved in social media to date, we ask for your patience. Layout, grammar, spelling, images, et al. won't be perfect, but, let's go for it!