ADVENTURE ON A BUDGET | TRAVEL BLOG
It’s phenomenal what can happen in your life when you just will it to happen. And, sometimes things serendipitously cruise along at the perfect time, with the perfect people and the perfect place. We feel this way about this last minute housesit in rural Castelo Branco, Portugal, a place we never would have gone otherwise, and is an example of…
From Porto, we hopped a one hour train ride north to the town of Braga, a lively city which is one of the oldest in the country dating more than 2000 years. In fact, in the Middle Ages it competed in power and importance with Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Its cathedral is the oldest in the country built in…
Porto is one of those cities that is dripping with European charm...red roof tops, contrasting sapphire blue waters, port wine flowing like water, and azulejos bedecking every other surface you encounter. It has a long and fascinating history as a port city, endless captivating colors and pedestrian thoroughfares dotting the spaces near the Douro River. It's undoubtedly immensely walkable, and…
Tales from Hans Christian Anderson have been embedded within us since childhood, so it’s very difficult to not start singing when you think of this spellbinding city. We went to Denmark during July 2018 when we were en route from Sweden to Prague, and because we were sticking with a $50/day for both of us budget, we didn’t last long…
After a 10-year Pacific Northwest hiatus, it was finally time to be reunited with the city where it all began...where Greg spent seven years of his life as a professor at Charles University before meeting Mandy in 2007, who had recently moved there to be an English teacher. See that story. We were more than ready to return...to be wrapped…
Our favorite thing to do when we lived in Prague was leave the city behind, often via the wonder paths of the Czech trail system. Trails weave through cities, villages, pastureland, valleys and hills, natural attractions, and historic sites. All with easy-to-understand color coded trail markers that even the most navigationally challenged can follow. Geography fun fact: the Czech Republic…
There is so much more to Czechia than Prague. In fact, when we were teaching English in the mid-2000’s, it was a well-worn joke that all of our students had “a house...in the nature” and they would tell us stories about weekending in the Czech countryside, amongst emerald deciduous forests, sweeping rock formations and tinker toy villages. The nature of…
We had officially entered Moravian Czech wine country, a magical place that seems to be plucked out of the Mediterranean, and dropped into southeastern Czechia. Moravia, a lesser visited region of the country has a distinctly more Croatian/Italian feel, lightness, and warmth about it than its sister region, Bohemia. Not to mention, with a four-hour train journey between them ($10/ticket)…