The Ghost Town That Wasn’t

We were in San Miguel de Allende, enjoying all the classic traits of a pretty Mexican town  – a gorgeous church dominating the skyline on the main plaza, colonial architecture with carved wooden doors and wrought-iron balconies, winding cobblestone streets, and quaint local markets where indigenous women sold traditional crafts. […]

From Tulum Trauma to San Miguel Magic

Our flight to Monterrey got cancelled again.  The first time, a year ago, we rebooked it for Mexico City, but this time airfare to León was cheap enough to make us consider going there… again. We had already taken the same flight a few years earlier and spent three wonderful […]

Mexican Chicago

Back in 2003, when I’d just arrived in Chicago, my first apartment was in Hermosa on the city’s northwest side. One evening, when I was in the back porch relaxing after a day of work, the street was suddenly filled with the sound of the revving engines. Motorcycles and cars […]

Go For Gözleme

The previous post about fish, bread, and never giving up on food dreams reminded me of something that happened two years ago, during a road trip from Izmir to Antalya in Türkiye. We left our Airbnb early in the morning, eager to start a long day of sightseeing, and skipped […]

Searching for Fish and Bread in Istanbul

Two years ago, when we did a road trip through southwest Türkiye, I kept looking for balık ekmek.  If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry.  Neither did I.  But Victor kept mentioning how he and his parents enjoyed a delicious balık ekmek in a restaurant by the Bosphorus […]

Normandy: Not Just Another Day at the Beach

By Victor / July 9, 2020

On the morning of the fourth day of our French trip, I was both apprehensive and excited. The main reason we came to Normandy was to tour the D-Day beaches. The history geek in me had been waiting for this day in great anticipation. Before the trip, I read what […]

Baskets, Oysters, and Omeletes – A Day Wandering Through Normandy and Bretagne

By Victor / July 2, 2020

We woke up in Bayeux and had a busy day ahead of us.  The plan was to explore not only the sights in Normandy but also those in neighboring Bretagne. But first things first-breakfast at a Saturday market. Visiting a Saturday market is one of those truly not-to-be-missed French experiences. […]

Normandy, France or How We Spent Nearly $4,000 in Four Days

By Victor / June 25, 2020

In the summer of 2009, after I finished another year of law school, we traveled to France. I flew to Paris two days before Julia to get my “art museum” fix and managed to visit four museums in that time. But once in Paris, I immediately discovered that food prices […]

The Highway to Our Own Personal Hell (Wyoming)

By Julia / June 18, 2020

Our road trip in 2004 had many memorable moments in California, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, but the one anecdote we always associate with this trip actually happened in the “drive-through” state of Wyoming, on a long stretch of a highway, deep at night. We were eight days deep into our […]

The Trip That Started It All

By Julia / June 11, 2020

This is probably going to be the oldest story published on this blog, back from March 2004, before we had our backpacks and cats.  Victor has been in the US for less than a year and was itching to discover more of America than just the Chicagoland area.  He was […]

A Traveler’s Dilemma: The Human Zoo

By Victor / May 28, 2020

In December 2013, while traveling through northern Thailand, we had the option of visiting a hill tribe village. In Chiang Mai, nearly every tourist agency advertised these tours with photos of smiling indigenous women with unnaturally long necks wrapped in brass rings. Initially, the trip looked tempting, and we even […]

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