Hi! We’re Hank and Cindy Kratzer, and we love traveling.
From our first backpacking trip together (over 30 years ago) to our most recent scuba diving adventure, we have used almost every vacation to travel the U.S. and the world.
Now that Hank is retired and Cindy almost retired, we are doing even more traveling, and looking for a way to share our journey with others. Our domain name inspiration comes from a Steven Curtis Chapman song, “The Great Adventure.” The first two lines of the song are: “Saddle up your horses; We’ve got a trail to blaze,” so that’s how we created our first blog ever: Trail2Blaze.com
Unlike many travel bloggers, we are not full-time on the road. We love our home in Southern California, and it’s a great place to come back to (spending the winter where we can walk two blocks to the beach every day). Together, we’ve been to 46 states, 8 Canadian provinces, 16 countries, 54 of the 63 U.S. National Parks, and 17 Canadian national parks; and we’ll be adding to most of those numbers in the coming year.
RV Travel: We have always camped, but sleeping on the ground in a tent was not so much fun anymore, so a few years ago we traded in our sleeping bags for a 31’ motorhome (towing our CR-V behind us to use during day trips). Now we don’t care if it’s 17 degrees (Fahrenheit) in Yellowstone National Park—we have a heater (3 in fact!).
Dive Travel: We’ve always enjoyed snorkeling and would spend our entire Hawaii vacations in the water, so, after watching scuba divers peel their dive gear on and off, we took the plunge (literally) in 2013, getting PADI-certified at Catalina Island here in SoCal. We figure that if we can dive locally, where it’s cold and hard to see, we can dive almost anywhere, and that’s what we’ve been doing—South Pacific, North Pacific, Caribbean, Florida, Southern California, and Africa. Most of our international travel revolves around diving, and we love seeing animals that we had never even heard of until a few years ago (wobbegong shark, nudibranch, and frogfish to name a few).
What’s the theme in our travel? It’s all about the critters. Yes, we like going to cool cities or learning about local history and culture for about a day, but then we’re ready to get back on the trail or under the water to look for bears, wolves, snakes, alligators, seahorses, manta rays, sharks, and so many other amazing animals. And when we take our RV around the country, our two cats get to go with us. How wonderful to have their smiling faces greeting us when we come back from a hike (though they’re really just saying, “Where’s our dinner?”).
We have added features that allow you to communicate with us, asking questions or sharing your own experiences. You can post a public comment to any of our blog posts. You can also Subscribe to our blog, and be notified by email whenever we add a new post (no ads, no politics, just stories about our travels).
We have learned so much about travel and about blogging from reading what others have written, so we hope to do the same for the next generation of travelers and bloggers. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our posts and photos, as we enjoy God’s creation and experience The Great Adventure!
Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad; let the sea resound, and all that is in it.
Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.
Let all creation rejoice before the Lord (Psalm 96:11-13)!