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2018 Entries
Death Valley, Vegas and Grand Canyon 27 Dec 2018 - 3 Jan 2019
We went on our usual Christmas break trip and traveled to a few places to keep knocking out those bucket list items. I've always
wanted to see the Salt Lake Flats at Death Valley National Park, and Kim had not seen the Grand Canyon yet. So while using Las Vegas as a
starting point, we traveled to these places. The Federal shutdown did not affect our trip adversely as the hotels and restaurants were all
open due to being contracted vendors. We spent a night at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley NP, and stayed at the Grand Canyon Train
hotel in Williams, AZ. We took the train into and out of the Grand Canyon on New Year's Day. It was bitter cold at the South Rim but
extremely clear. The snow just added to the appeal of the visit.
Together in Las Vegas Fremont Street
Death Valley National Park
Salt Lake Flats, 282 feet below sea level
Snowy Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon Train
Hoover Dam Selfie
Nutrition and Diet Journey in 2018
This year I changed my nutrition planning and eating in order to reduce my cholesterol to acceptable levels. Click
here for the page detailing my changes and my common meal ideas.
Highlights of Eastern Europe; 2-19 August 2018
Trafalgar trip through former Eastern Bloc countries. The trip started in Vienna, Austria, and traveled through
Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic and back to Vienna. Was a great trip, included at least
two nights in every major city, to include Zagreb, Budapest, Krakow, Warsaw, Berlin and Prague. While it was rather long,
staying in hotels two nights at a time kept it from feeling like too much road time. The panoramic pictures below were
stitched together automatically by Google Photos, better job than me trying to slowing pan my phone.
Lake
Bled, Slovenia
Lake
Bled, Slovenia
Budapest
Danube
River, Budapest
Parliament Building, Budapest
Czestochowa, Poland
Jewish Ghetto
Memorial, Warsaw, Poland
Warsaw, Poland
Reichstag, Berlin
Brandenburg
Gate, Berlin
>
Moritzburg
Castle, Germany
Prague, Czech
Republic
New England and Nova Scotia; 8-17 July 2018
Summer trip through Salem, Massachusetts and Saint John, New Brunswick to Nova Scotia and return through Portland, Maine. Was quite a long drive, over 2100 miles, and that was with us bypassing over 300 miles by taking a ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia direct to Portland. Here are some of the best photos from the trip.
Salem Witch Museum
Three Churches of Mahone Bay, NS
Peggy's Cove Lighthouse, NS
Portland Head Lighthouse, Maine
Buglight Lighthouse, Maine
A Random Walk Down Wall Street; 27 March 2018
There is a great excerpt from the classic investing book that really references how important
timing is towards actually making those 7-10% annual stock market gains that are always referenced when talking
about compounding towards retirement.
Professor H. Negat Seybun of the University of
Michigan found that 95 percent of the significant market gains over a thirty-year period came on 90 of the roughly 7,500
trading days. If you happened to miss those 90 days, just over 1 percent of the total, the generous long-run
stock-market returns of the period would have been wiped out.
Studying a longer
period, Laszlo Birinyi, in his book 'Master Trader', has calculated that a buy-and-hold investor would have seen
one dollar invested in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1900 grow to $290 by the start of 2015. Had the
investor missed the best five days each year, however, that dollar investment would have been worth less than a
penny in 2013.
How can we possible consider the market rational when there is no indication of steady growth, that
it is a hocus-pocus of charting that makes it look like its steadily growing, when just removing 5 data points,
completely changes the result?
Nashville, Tennessee; 18-22 August 2017
Went to the Grand Ole Opry Resort for the 21 August 2017 full solar eclipse. Nashville was dead center in the full eclipse zone and we got to see almost 90 seconds of full occlusion.
Sweden and Norway; 11-18 March 2017
Bought a Volvo XC-90 this year and part of the benefits is the option for overseas delivery. Volvo provided two roundtrip tickets, insurance and all arrangements to travel to Gutenberg, Sweden and pick up the car at the factory. The trip included one overnight stay and a factory visit. We extended the trip for the week and drove up to Oslo, Norway in addition to driving across the Swedish countryside. Great opportunity and they still delivered the car directly to my local dealer.
