On Island Time
Disclaimer: This incredibly sappy post was written by Carly, so don't worry. Austin still has his man card. It is incredibly bittersweet writing our last city post. I cannot think of a more beautiful place or better people to be around than the Greek islanders. The slow pace was exactly what we nee...
The City of the Gods
Visiting a place like Athens requires quite the imagination. Many of the ruins are very ruined, and the purpose of most that you'll find there was to pay tribute to one of countless Ancient Greek gods. The mythical story of the birth of Athens is like an ancient 50 Shades of Gray. It involves one ma...
When in Rome, Blog While You're Waiting for Your Clean Clothes to Dry
By design our plans for Rome started out very busy and then ended at a more relaxed pace. On our first day, we visited the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. Carly had already been to both sites on a previous trip, but even for her the immense scale of the buildings and the thousands of years of history...
Naples, Pompeii, and the Amalfi Coast
We took a train from Florence to Naples to explore the city before we took another regional train to Sorrento where we decided to stay for three nights. When we got off the train in Naples, we were struck by the trash and graffiti that were everywhere. Some streets look like a bomb went off in a dum...
A City of Greats
There's something about Florence that feels different than the typical large Italian city. Known as a city where greats like Michelangelo, Donatello, Machiavelli (Austin's favourite), Da Vinci (Carly's favourite), and Galileo came from or did their work, it retains much of the positive, inspiring vi...
Sweating Alongside Cliffs in the Cinque Terre
We just finished three days and two nights in Monterosso, which is first (or last) in a line of five small cliff-hugging towns that together comprise an area called the Cinque Terre. From Monterosso, one can see all of the towns, especially at night when their city lights form four distant constella...
The Bellini that Broke the Bank
Venice is a place where you spend way too much money and have fun doing it. To give you a sense of what we're talking about, we ordered $14 dollar coffees at Cafe Florian along Saint Mark's Square. Cafe Florian was probably the first place in Europe to serve coffee, and the rooms are very fancy, dec...
Rest and Relaxation in Nice
After the busyness of Paris, Nice offered a nice reprieve. At the top of five flights of stairs was probably the nicest hotel room we've ever seen. The bathroom alone was the size of some of our previous hostel rooms. Besides Nice, we day-tripped out to Monaco, Ville Franche sue Mer, and Antibes. M...
Passport to Paris
Paris, for us, was punctuated by rain and lots of people. Storms seemed to come out of nowhere, and only about half of the time we were prepared with rain jackets and umbrellas. We hoped the rain would wash some of the other tourists away, but it didn't seem to do the trick. Everywhere we went, ther...
Magic in the Venice of the North
Carly here...I had to jump in for a "guest writing" piece because I'm not sure my husband's matter-of-fact, "policy" writing style can best capture the charm and magic that was the little town of Brugge, Belgium. However, he will edit this post because I am most definitely not a writer. We got to Br...
Tubing through London
Our goals for London were simple: Visit museums in the morning, score a seat at Gordon's Wine Bar at night, and enjoy an afternoon tea in between. Our two favorite tourist sites ended up being Westminister Abbey and the Churchill War Rooms. We also visited the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, an...
Our T'ree days in Ireland
Our three nights and four days in Ireland have come to an end. After a day-long flight into Dublin, we rented a BMW and drove two and a half hours through the countryside towards the west coast. It was everything, we imagined the Irish countryside to be, complete with rolling green hills, sheep, sto...
The Day Before the Day Before
We’ve promised many of our friends and family that we’d do some sort of blog during our trip to Europe. Two days before the trip, we thought it’d be good to write our first post. We finished packing our bags, and we were both happy that they came in so light. Austin’s end up weighing only 22 pounds...