Next up on our holiday gift guide is the “armchair” traveler in your family. While this person may not actually take a lot of trips themselves, they love learning about new places and exploring the world while staying a little bit closer to home…
Megan Bannister
As part of Olio in Iowa’s inaugural holiday gift guide, I’ll be sharing a variety of seasonal selections for all the different types of travelers in your life.
Up first is your wanderlust-stricken best friend, the one who is always planning her next vacation or scouring travel websites to the serendipitous $150 ticket to Iceland…
After a morning of wandering around the Amana Colonies, we headed up the street to Millstream Brewing Company for a beer and some early afternoon snacks. Opened in 1985, Millstream is Iowa’s oldest microbrewery and the first to operate in Amana since 1884…
One of the best parts of exploring the Amana Colonies during the holiday season was our visit to the Tannenbaum Forest. Located inside the Festhalle Barn across from the Amana Visitors’ Bureau, it’s pretty hard not to feel jolly when you step inside the forest lit with hundreds of warmly growing Christmas lights…
For all of the Iowa exploration I’ve done, until this weekend I still hadn’t found my way to the Amana Colonies. While there are technically seven villages that make up Amana, we stuck to exploring Main Amana and taking in the Prelude to Christmas festivities for this trip…
Today I’ve got another #throwbackThursday post to share from the San Francisco road trip I took a few years back. On our first day in the car (where we decided it was a good idea to drive all the way across Nebraska—not something I’d recommend), we stopped in North Platte for dinner…
Winter is slowly descending over the Midwest, which means, among other things, that it’s not as easy for me to get out and explore as it is in the warmer months. So instead, I decided to create a little #throwbackThursday post for one of my favorite, now-defunct roadside oddities…
It’s been awhile since I first visited the World’s Largest Ball of Stamps in Boys Town, Nebraska, but that doesn’t make it any less cool. Tucked away in the Village of Boys Town Visitors Center, you’ll find a roadside attraction with more than Nebraska’s stamp of approval…
As I quickly learned, there aren’t a lot of interesting stops heading west along I-80 from Chicago to Connecticut, but one sunny afternoon of our road trip we stopped in Toledo, Ohio for a bite to eat and were charmed by Tony Packo’s…
I’ve blogged a lot about wine and visiting wineries before, but until this weekend, I’d never had much insight into how wine is actually made. Summerset Winery’s Fall Harvest has been on my Iowa bucket list for awhile now and this past Saturday a friend and I finally headed south toward Indianola to try our hand at grape picking (and stomping)…