Malta was not somewhere we ever imagined going to when we began planning our adventure. After all, this exquisite Mediterranean island is 60 miles from Sicily and 200 miles from Tripoli... and not exactly a budget destination. However, as luck/fortune/fate would have it shortly before we left Portland we scored a sweet two-week house and dog sit opportunity in Melliha,…
Transylvania... an evocative and mysterious land that seems to dominate the plots of so many vampire and werewolf tales. A place that seems ingrained in our imaginations to be a storybook land of fog enshrouded valleys and forgotten-by-time quaint medieval villages punctuated by dark and foreboding castles perched on rocky outcrops. But its storied cobblestoned streets, spellbinding castles, and unbelievably…
Fringed by the peaks of the southern Carpathian Mountains, Braşov is one of those European cities that is simply saturated in charm with its gothic spires, baroque buildings, medieval gates and daunting towers. It is also a city which is rapidly being discovered and will undoubtedly escalate with the opening of an airport currently under construction. There are abundant opportunities…
Sometimes in life you just gotta take a walk to savor slow travel at its utmost. The Romanian countryside around the small city of Miercurea Ciuc in autumn is ripe, and beckoned us to set out on an admittedly very vague plan to walk a “Mineral Water Trail” dotted with natural springs and thermal baths spread out over 50+ km…
When we arrived to Romania, we were treading into an unknown. For the first time since leaving the U.S. in July, we didn’t have any plan for where we were going in the coming weeks. On the ground in Bucharest and Braşov we began asking a few locals, “what’s your favorite place to visit in Romania?” Almost without hesitation, and…
Mt. Ararat looms over the city of Yerevan at 5,137 m. (16,854 ft). Ararat, now in Turkey, is notable as the mountain on which Noah’s Ark landed upon, and according the Bible, the remains rest there under its snow-capped peak. Armenians consider Ararat the symbol of their state no matter where the mountain lies . There is a giant statue…
We never expected to spend eight weeks in Phnom Penh, or for that matter, ten weeks in Cambodia, but COVID-19 gave us an opportunity. If we had to be “stuck” in a SE Asian country, we think we landed in a good spot, especially based on the more Draconian measures set forth in neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. The Cambodian government,…
Before COVID shut down all the tourist sights in Phnom Penh, we went to the Tuolsleng Genocide Museum, followed by the Killing Fields, one of only 343 known sites where thousands of Cambodians were executed by their own people during the 1975-1979 Genocide. Three million of Cambodia’s eight million died during this tragic regime. This is when the Khmer Rouge…
