Year: 2019

11 Awesome New York Waterfalls to Visit That Aren’t Niagara Falls

Out of all of the natural formations out there in the world, one of our favorites is waterfalls. These beautiful walls of water can take on various shapes and forms and are awe-inspiring every time we see them.

As far as New York waterfalls are concerned, they're among some of the very best in the country- and many are just as inspiring (if not more) than the iconic Niagara Falls!

Since we are frequent travelers in upstate New York, we wanted to share a few of our favorites today (although the below are certainly not a collection of them all- there are a ton of waterfalls in NY worth checking out!). So if you find yourself on a New York road trip between Rochester and Syracuse, or are perhaps checking out wineries in the Finger Lakes, be sure to detour to these great falls!

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How to Get a French Laundry Reservation (and Meal Review)

The French Laundry in Yountville, CA, is a three-Michelin-starred restaurant that is notoriously hard to get a reservation for. Because we love food and love experiencing travel destinations via food, we knew we had to at least try to get a French Laundry reservation on our recent trip to check out Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries.

We ended up being successful, so we wanted to share our tips for landing a coveted spot, as well as a general review of the meal and experience.

The hype around getting reservations for The French Laundry is pretty intense. But we found that if you understand the process, can plan far in advance, and are somewhat flexible in your dining date and time, a reservation is fairly easily attainable.

As with all posts on this site, the following is based on our visit date in early 2019. The booking process is liable to change.

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5 of Our Favorite Napa and Sonoma Wineries to Visit

In a previous article, we broke down the differences between Napa and Sonoma to give broad views on these two rather unique winemaking regions.

In it, we loosely mentioned some of the vineyards we checked out during our first trip to the area, but spent most of the article speaking in generalities about the regions as a whole.

Today, we wanted to dive into the Napa Valley wineries and Sonoma wineries themselves, and highlight a few that stood out to us as being must visits!

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Tips to Improve Page Speed Insights Scores with a GeneratePress Theme

If you're like me, you're probably obsessive about your site speed. It doesn't matter the service, I want to do whatever I can to get the best possible scores, load times, and ratings- even if some don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Out of all of the services that are out there, one that is the holy grail is Google's Page Speed Insights (PSI) as it is one of the few tools provided by the search giant that gives clues on how website owners can improve. (Plus non-Google tools like WebpageTest at GTMetrix to round out further analyses.)

Naturally, we latched on to it and made it our quest to top out in the highest category on our sites.

Unfortunately, our site on our old theme (Elegant Themes) only took us so far, and we knew it was time to upgrade. We switched to GeneratePress, made some customizations, and both our desktop and mobile scores jumped (with mobile scores in the high 80s and desktop flirting with 100 most days).

Today, I wanted to share the techniques I used to make this happen as it won't come out of the box.

Note: Before we begin it is worth pointing out that at the end of the day site speed is king. Google PSI scores are mainly a suggestion. Although we're in the weeds with it you can have a fast site without a high score, and no one is really certain if a high score provides an SEO benefit like a fast site. Our interest in this is purely because we can optimize it over a more practical reason. This could change in the future and we'll update accordingly.

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