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Brittany L. Bergman

Savoring motherhood, building marriage, and living simply

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Introducing a TBT Travel Series: First Stop, California!

Mar 4 16 Comments

The thing about being a non-nomadic travel blogger is that, by definition, I travel for a pretty small percentage of my time. But my wanderlust runs deep, and I have no shortage of trips in my little life so far that have taught me some beautiful lessons.

Tomorrow I’ll kick off a new TBT-style series in which every other Thursday, I’ll be sharing my favorite trips, travel moments, and lessons learned through travel.

Part of the beauty of traveling is that the memories stay with us forever. Each trip opens our minds. Each memory changes our hearts. Sometimes in small ways, and sometimes in monumental ways.

I’m excited to share my previous and my future travels with you! Here’s a sneak peek about what to expect in the upcoming California series.


One year ago this week, Dan and I packed our bags and headed for the West Coast. Not until adulthood did I feel the compulsion to visit any place west of the Mississippi. I grew up as a hybrid midwesterner-southeasterner, and I believed the East Coast—from the dangling Florida Keys, stretching through Charleston and Cape Cod, all the way to the backcountry of Maine—was about as charming and perfect as America could be.

A summertime trip to Denver for a dear friend’s wedding changed my mind about the West in general. The deciding factor? Dry. Heat.

“Dry” is not a thing where I grew up in Jacksonville Beach and in the stagnant, heavy Georgia air.

You mean to tell me there’s a whole region of the country where you can enjoy mountains and beaches and sunshine without choking on the solid air? Dan had to force me onto the airplane for our return trip from sunny San Francisco to cold, but still somehow humid, Chicago.

Near the end of last February, Dan and I realized that we each had two weeks of vacation to use or lose by the end of March. Within a matter of days, we decided to do a taste-of-California trip, starting in Los Angeles, driving up to Yosemite National Park, and then back toward the coast to San Francisco. A week later, our airline tickets and rental car were booked. And a week after that, we were off.

Those two weeks were a whirlwind of budgets, planning, phone calls, research, reservations, and dreaming about all the mouth-watering food stops we’d make and the adventures we’d have. I usually love the long season of anticipation and planning that leads up to a trip, so I was a little disappointed that we’d be leaving so soon. But I actually enjoyed every single moment of those days, as Dan and I sat cuddled in bed nearly every night, I with my laptop and he with his iPad, swapping stories of deals and ogling over pictures of the sites we’d see.

As you probably know—and if you don’t, I’m so sorry for bursting this bubble for you—California is known for its outrageously high cost of living. It permeates the travel business, too, folks. It was particularly disappointing when we fell in love with San Francisco and realized that we’d literally have to win the lottery to live there.

All this to say, we had to stretch every single dollar of our budget. With some very careful planning, by cutting out many of the luxuries people equate with vacationing, and with the help of several unexpected blessings throughout our trip, we came in slightly under our projected budget of $2,000 for 8 days of travel. I know it sounds like a lot of money for a domestic trip (we spent $2400 for our 8-day honeymoon in Mexico, which included unlimited food and drinks), but we cut almost every corner aside from a few food splurges (and we ate economically the rest of the time to make up for those).

Over the next few installments of TBT posts, I’ll share the highlights of each destination (food! sites! people!) as well as our money-saving tricks along the way. Tomorrow, I’ll share more about how we saved money on the front end as we booked everything just two weeks before departure. Until then, I’ll leave you with a few favorite photos.

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Filed Under: Travel Tagged With: adventure, budgeting, California, experiences, Los Angeles, San Francisco, TBT, travel, vacation, Yosemite

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It’s a great day to witness the shattering of a glass ceiling, to embrace empathy and decency, and to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

The work is only just beginning, but today, we celebrate. Congratulations, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris! 👏🏼🎉💙
What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaki What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaking, cozy, chaotic-but-strangely-quiet Christmas we had. ✨🎄✨

That’s a wrap for me on 2020—I’ll be off social media until sometime in January. May you be filled with peace and hope as we close this year but still wait for the close of this chapter in our history. 💜
I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; d I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; depression and rage; exhaustion and loneliness. But I can honestly say this is the weariest Christmas I can remember. I say that not to shine a spotlight on me, but to say that I have a feeling this might be your experience too. I’m with you.
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And so the words to my favorite Christmas hymn hit me different this year. They resonate in a place much deeper, more tender and true than ever before. I rejoice in the giggles of my meltdown-prone child. I rejoice in stolen moments alone in the dark, the room lit only by the glow of the Christmas tree. I rejoice in every video and every social media post I see of a frontline worker receiving the COVID vaccine, our ticket out of this nightmare. I rejoice in the vision that next Christmas might look more familiar than this one does. I rejoice in the hope of Christ, whose universal, creative, motherly love holds the whole universe together.
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On this Christmas Eve, I’ll leave you with this quote from Howard Thurman. I hope these words bring a slant of light to your day.
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“The symbol of Christmas—what is it? It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.”
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Whatever and however you celebrate at this time of year, I’m sending you all my love and peace. 💫
I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in the nick of time.

I baked cookies with Selah without getting frustrated (first time ever?), took the kids on drive to see Christmas lights, and wrapped a bunch of gifts.

But here’s what I think did the trick, and please do steal this idea (because I stole it from someone else but have no idea who): Magical Movie Night™️.

On Saturday night, I stealthily placed a golden ticket under Selah’s pillow (which I printed from the internets and colored quickly with a yellow marker; good enough is good enough for Magical Movie Night!). We put Eamon to bed and got Selah ready for bed too, going through all the normal motions of brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, picking out a book. When we climbed into bed, I told her to look under her pillow.

She was confused when she found the ticket, and I told her it was for a Christmas movie night. “When?” she asked. “Right now!” I said. “What do you mean ‘right now’?” When it dawned on her that she was going to stay up past her bedtime to have a special movie night with Mommy and Daddy (sans Eamon), she lost her mind with excitement.

Bonus: Gramma was waiting downstairs with a bag of popcorn and Swedish Fish!

We snuggled under blankets, turned on Elf, and laughed our festive butts off. (This was her first time watching Elf, and it felt like the dawning of a new era. It’s such a big kid movie! And she loved it! Hold me. 😭)

Deck the halls, bring on Christmas, fill my mug with holly jolly goodness. 

I also acknowledge this has been a crappy year in so many ways, and I know many of you are not going to be able to access Christmas cheer this year. That’s okay. The real spirit of Christmas is light breaking through the dark, love making a way, and the beauty that can’t help seeping through the dirty, messy, horribly human moments of our lives. So you’re covered.

(And if you want to fake it ’til you make it, give Magical Movie Night a try. It’s the actual easiest.)
In which I couldn’t come up with a clever captio In which I couldn’t come up with a clever caption. There are signs of life but my brain is dead. 💀
“This is what I find most mystifying about Adven “This is what I find most mystifying about Advent: the period of waiting ultimately ends in great joy, but we can’t get to that great joy without intense, active, unbearable pain. In Advent we sense the mingling of anticipation and anxiety, excitement and disappointment, joy and pain, hope and fear.
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“On this side of history, we have the luxury of waiting with great hope, great joy, and great expectation. We know Jesus will be born, we know he will save us and redeem us, we know he will die and rise again, and we know he will set all things right one day.
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“But before Christ came, Advent was dark. It was lonely and unknown, as the Israelites waited in faith to hear from God, and all they got was… nothing. Silence.
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“Isn’t this more characteristic of the waiting we usually do? The waiting seasons of our lives are less often marked by joy and hope and more often marked by pain and fear. They are not often cozy or comforting but difficult and dark and even laborious.
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“We wait as a pregnant mother waits for her child to be born—there’s a vision of the joy to come, to be sure, but in the throes of gut-wrenching labor pains, we think we might actually die before we see that joy fulfilled. After a long season of pregnancy, when the fullness of time has arrived, the advent of labor ushers in the real period of waiting—and it is active and painful and raw.”
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// From “In the Fullness of Time,” a new blog post on @first15. There’s a link in my bio to the whole piece, with thoughts on pregnancy, Advent, and waiting well in an exceptionally hard year. 💜 Thank you so much to @first15 for publishing this post!
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Brittany L Bergman is a for-profit blog. Any company that I collaborate with is chosen by me and fits the theme and readership of my blog. At times, posts may contain affiliate links or sponsored content, which is never at any charge to you.

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