I got home last night from Chicago, which over the last few years has definitely earned its place as one of my favorite cities in the world. I was in town to visit my best friend Charlie, although he kept joking that I was just crashing with him while on a business trip. The photo of Charlie below is the only one I managed to capture snow falling in, and let me tell you, I got pretty excited about that snow, because my feeling is that if I’m going to be really cold, there might as well be snow around.

Charlie works in the specialty-coffee-industry (at least 80% of my rediculous-coffee-snobbishness can be directly attributed to him) and his killer home coffee bar was recently featured in the Chicago Reader.

The trip mainly consisted of large quantities of all of my favorite things: eating, walking, talking, and drinking (of coffee, tea, and booze.) Highlights included: getting majorly overly-spiced (in a good way) at Lao Hunan (pictured directly above), getting to sit in on an espresso QC meeting with Charlie & his coworkers (second photo from top), great meals with two different Chicago-based clients, and an amazing dinner at the home of Cindy & Julia of Crafty Broads, the guest list of which included the really lovely Chicago-based wedding photographers Christy Tyler and Emilia of Emilia Jane Photography (I also had drinks earlier in the week with Emilia and her adorable husband Wil at The Violet Hour, one of my favorite bars in the world.)

Thanks Chicago! Next time let’s maybe work on not being so cold.

(also, a note: I typically shoot film when I travel, and all of the photos in this post are unretouched SLR shots. I did not super love the black & white film I used, and need to remember what it was so that I don’t buy it again.)

Over the holidays, someone in my family commented that I travel a lot, and everyone else immediately chimed in to agree. To which I cried foul, because, well, I really don’t think of myself as someone who travels that much. Last year I made one trip to Chicago, and two to New York. The year before was about the same, plus a trip to Mexico. However, the comment resulted in making me want to be someone who travels a lot (hilariously, because it wasn’t meant as one, I chose to take it as a challenge.)

So – a goal for this year is to spend at least one night a month in another city. Because I’m far from rich, I’m going to allow work trips to other parts of California to count, which my spring and summer are already fairly full of. And when I really started looking at my calendar I’m almost there! Current trips I already have planned for this year include:

• February: Chicago
• April: Las Vegas & New York
• May: Solvang & Sonoma (and possibly New York again)
• June: Sonoma
• July: Napa, and hopefully Longbarn
• August: Half Moon Bay
• September: Sonoma
• October: New York
• November: New York (yes, again!) & Philadelphia

Which means I need to get myself somewhere this month and make sure to plan something for next December. In March I’m hoping to fit in a long weekend in LA, because it’s been far too long (at least two years) since I’ve been down there.

I’d like to note that all of this is domestic travel, and the majority of it is local travel (more than one but less than three hours in a car = local travel.) My poor passport is feeling very neglected these days, but it’s unfortunately looking like it’s going to stay that way for a while…

So, some objective opinions – do I travel a lot? Do you want to travel more? Where are the top destinations on your list of placed to go (one of mine, oddly, is Antarctica, and has been for more than a decade.)

photo: from my last trip to New York, via my iPhone