Taiwan: Shaking in Our Boots

It was an evening of our last day in Kaohsiung, and we were visiting the Dragon and Tiger Pagodas.  Temples in Taiwan usually have dragons painted by one set of doors to indicate that those doors are used to enter the temple, and tigers by another set of doors, which […]

Day Lilies, Yuli Noodles, and the Mountain Mist

Of the four days in the East, we spent three days driving up and down the coastal highway.  These days were filled with stopping at ocean viewpoints, exploring the shoreline’s rugged geoparks, and learning about local indigenous culture. But as we navigated through this narrow stretch of land, sandwiched between […]

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 […]

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 […]

Egypt: Camping in the Desert Mustafa-Style

By Julia / May 21, 2020

Our Egypt desert adventures start here. As the sun was setting over the White Desert, our Jeep headed towards the overnight camping spot.  With no large dunes or stones to block our view of sunset or sunrise, our guide and driver found a spot in a large flat valley, white […]

Egypt: Black Desert, White Desert, Best Desert

By Julia / May 14, 2020

We’ve never had a bad trip.  We’ve had a lot of mishaps and quite frankly several shitshows, but we never have been to a country we didn’t like.  And now, looking back at dozens of excellent trips we’ve taken around the world, I can tell you with complete honesty and […]

Subscribe to receive our stories in your inbox

Loading