By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate Smith River Steaming temps in the inland valleys of Southern Oregon are sending smart travelers to the coast to cool off. The Redwood Hwy (199), out of Grants Pass is a snaking road that takes you to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, the northern most redwood forest in […]
By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate Every bend of the river beckons—every pool may bring better luck. Life should be like that. — Zane Grey The Rogue River is a vital artery in southwestern Oregon that flows 215 miles from Crater Lake to Gold Beach on the coast. Rainie Falls is the take out […]
According to author Ronald Surz, most of us Baby Boomers are going to be spending much of this decade (the 2020’s, which are still in early days) in what he calls the Risk Zone – his term for the ten years before and after Retirement. Surz, who has been an investment consultant since 1974, and […]
By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate Storm on the beach Years ago, when I lived on the beach in a pole house on the north shore of Kauai, Hawaii, we loved the wild storms that would blow through, threatening to wash us away. The […]
By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate After eleven years, I decided it was time to deliver the fruitcake my mother had sent me in 2009 just before she passed away. Mom’s Meadow I would take it to the meadow where I had scattered her ashes. I had kept it in my freezer (even through […]
By Linda Ballou, NABBW’s Adventure Travel Associate In writing Embrace of the Wild I hope to have turned the lemons of Covid-19 into limoncello—a zesty elixir that excites and satisfies the senses. In early 2020, I returned from a whirlwind tour of Australia just in time for the Covid-19 lockdown. I was grateful to be back […]
I was not initially familiar with the story of Englishwoman Lady Isabella Lucy Bird, so I didn’t know what to expect when I began reading Linda Ballou’s newest book, Embrace of the Wild: Inspired by Equestrian Explorer Isabella Bird. However I was lucky enough to read it just days after publication, and am pleased to tell you […]
Being originally from Wisconsin, which boasts being The Dairy State, I have alway loved cooking, baking and eating foods made with real butter. (I’m actually a butter snob, truth be told.) So when this sunny looking, smallish paperback came across my desk, touting that life is better with butter, I just had to pick it […]
If you’re a home-owning Baby Boomer looking for a profitable side hustle, this book is for you. You’ll be especially interested if, going forward, your personal housing preference is not to move to a Retirement community, but to stay in the family homestead – or at lest the home you currently live in – and […]
As author Ralph Mroz states in the first sentence of this book, we’re all going to die. But, he says, the more important question is, how hard is dealing with your death going to be – both for you and for the people you leave behind? Obviously, your family and the other people who are […]