Vacation Time in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula **Becauseitzthere is mainly a hiking blog, but from time to time we feature outdoor pursuits of the less rugged kind, including posts of the ‘pursuit of leisure’ variety. Well, there aren’t many places on Earth where leisure is pursued with greater vigor than at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Located at the very tip of […]
We’re Back!
Brian and Sylvia celebrate their Tenth Wedding Anniversary We’re back from celebrating our Tenth Wedding Anniversary! Has it really been ten years? The typical gift given on the Tenth Anniversary is described as ‘tin or aluminum.’ Therefore we decided to give one another the gift of aluminum…in the form of an airplane fuselage, which we rode all the way to […]
More How to Spend Summer in the South
What To Do When It’s Too Hot To Hike: Part II In our last post we talked about some of the ways to beat the heat in the Carolinas. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it’s awfully hot and buggy to be indulging in the sport of hiking. We do it anyway to keep in shape, trying to go as […]
How to Spend Summer In the South
What To Do When It’s Too Hot To Hike: Part I We hope you had a happy Independence Day! The Fourth of July is the day Americans celebrate the simple joy of being an American, which is certainly something celebrate.But it has other meanings as well. For some, it’s also a day when we reflect upon the enormous sacrifices made […]
Surf Dog! Fun and Frolics at Fort Macon, NC
Fitz Roy Visits Fort Macon State Park Beach Sylvia and I are all about doing something new. Last weekend, we went to the beach. For us, this is nothing new. We live only two or three hours from some of the best beaches in the Eastern US north of Florida. We make several trips to the fine coastal areas of […]
Shock, Sorrow…And Hope…for Our Lady of Paris
Notre Dame Cathedral Burns Just Eight Months After We Visited *BecauseItzThere was planning to run the third in a series of posts about our preparations for Patagonia. However, in light of the tragic events in France — and a place which we feel oddly connected to — we decided that can wait a bit.* By now almost everyone who has […]
The Grand Canyon’s Grand Front Door
Glen Canyon, AZ While the far-reaching views from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon may be the most enigmatic and spectacular, there is a particularly intimate magic to being inside the canyon itself. One cannot really know the place without being underneath its shadowy depths. But there’s a rub…there’s still no easy way into the canyon. The advent of […]
King Charles Town
Charleston, SC Part II After visiting Fort Moultrie Sylvia made Brian swear not to visit any more forts or historical sites for the remainder of the trip. Brian grudgingly agreed. However, this would not really be possible since Charleston — Travel and Leisure Magazine’s ‘World’s Best City” in 2016 — basically is one gigantic historical site. With apologies to the […]
A Weekend of Coastal Fortification in Charleston, SC
Charleston, South Carolina ***Though BecauseItzThere is mostly a hiking blog, from time to time we will showcase travel of other sorts here, especially when it related to the outdoors, nature and history. As we’ve been hitting the mountains a lot lately, including two weeks of it in Europe, it was only a matter of time before Sylvia shouted “Enough” and […]
An Unexpected Blast From the Past
The Golden State, back in our Golden Age I was recently rooting through some of my old photographs from the pre-digital and early digital age…the days when you still had to get pictures ‘developed’ before you could see them. I must admit I have no nostalgia for this age whatsoever. My purpose was to dig up so old pictures from […]