Many people have heard of Telluride, Colorado. It’s a ski town similar to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and visited by a similar crowd. It’s beautiful but expensive. Fewer people have heard of Ouray, Colorado, a small town just over the mountains from Telluride but, in my opinion, a much more interesting and even more beautiful place….

Ok, no, Wyoming is not a city. And it barely even has any cities. Sheep in Wyoming outnumber people 3:1. Its largest city is smaller than many suburbs. But the purpose of the Second Rate Cities segment of the blog is to highlight places you wouldn’t normally think of as travel destinations. So, I’m going…

I might have a slight bias towards Houston seeing as I currently live there. Before I moved to the Bayou City, I lived in Colorado, one of the most touted[  places in the country, and while I loved it for many, many reasons, I am so glad I left to go explore another place, especially…

Most people know Pittsburgh as the home of the steel industry. Many also know that the steel industry in the United States is no longer relevant to the economy in any significant way. So, what happened to Pittsburgh? One might assume it ended up like Detroit after the decline of the auto industry, but that’s…

We all have those cities in our mind that stand out as especially bad. They’re too hot. Too cold. Too crowded. Too boring. Too dirty. Etc. Some of them seem nearly universally agreed on. Places you’d never even consider when planning a vacation. They are the places that are cheap to fly to, cheap to…