The Wild, Wild East: Taiwan’s Enigmatic East Coast

Like Alishan, we considered cutting the East Coast out of our itinerary entirely. The region was remote, and it was a logistical puzzle to plan.  Also, it was the only place in Taiwan where we needed to rent a car and potentially drive through what looked on the map like […]

Food.  Taiwan.  Must I Say More?

I wanted to write about the top 10 dishes we ate in Taiwan and quickly realized that the list was way longer than 10 and each dish deserved its own blog post, and this would quickly spiral into Two Cats Backpack Eats Taiwanese Food for Entirety of the Foreseeable Future […]

Breakfast of Champions in Taiwan

One thing that never stopped surprising me about Taiwan is how you can be strolling down a sidewalk one moment and the next, you are suddenly in the middle of a busy restaurant. And I don’t mean just outdoor seating, which is common enough around the world. I am talking […]

Little Teapot Short and Stout

If your country historically has rocks and water in close proximity to each other, I will probably end up writing a post about it. Let me explain. Anywhere in the world where there are rocks and water, there will usually be deposits of clay, created by the breakdown of igneous […]

The Mist, the Cloud, the Tea, and the Sunset: The Trails of Shizhuo

The hardest part of any itinerary is usually not where to visit or when, but for how long. There are always disagreements online over how much time each place deserves, with some people claiming to have fully explored everything in one day, while others take a week. And when it’s […]

The Prettiest Town in Mexico

By Julia / May 16, 2024

“We are going to the prettiest town in Mexico,” Victor said as we were packing our backpacks for the flight. “Says who?” I demanded, “Who decides what’s the ‘prettiest town”? What’s the prettiest town in the US? In Europe? In the world?  I’ve never even heard of Guanajuato before you […]

Rhode Island: Gilded Age of Our Travels

By Victor / May 2, 2024

How do you spell “Victor”? How do you spell “Julia”? I wasn’t sure what I expected before visiting Rhode Island, but learning a new language was certainly not what I planned for. But here we were, at the gift shop of the Sailing Museum in Newport, unexpectedly immersed in the […]

Part II:  It’s Good to Be Home

By Julia / April 18, 2024

Start with Part I here.  Short version: Victor became terribly sick with a fever and rash on our 15-hour flight from Dubai to Newark. There was good news and bad news.  Good news – Victor did make it back to the U.S.  Bad news – we were landing in Newark […]

Long Way Home

By Julia / April 11, 2024

On the morning of December 31st, Victor started running a fever.  It wasn’t too bad, and he didn’t even want to slow down or skip any of the sightseeing we had planned for that day.  I gave him a few pills of ibuprofen and forgot about it.  We celebrated that […]

Unexpected Oman

By Julia / April 5, 2024

There were many ways Oman surprised me, mostly due to my complete lack of knowledge about its history, politics, and, as crazy as it sounds, geographical location.  For whatever reason, I only considered countries separated by a land border to be Oman’s neighbors and cultural influencers.  It never occurred to […]

Paying the Price for Visiting Oman

By Victor / March 28, 2024

Recently, we did something we had never done before.  We went for an extended trip to a very expensive country. Or so we thought we did. Oman was our first Gulf country, and all we heard before our visit was that oil-rich countries of the region were not the friendliest […]

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