If they’re not already, the Azores Islands deserve a spot on your vacation short list. These Portugese islands are in the Atlantic Ocean, about a three hour flight from the mainland (or a 5 hour flight from the East Coast USA). The islands are accessible, affordable, easy to get around, beautiful, and so much fun! I can’t recommend a trip here enough. For this trip, I was traveling with my pal Katharine. Unfortunately, John didn’t have enough time off work to…
We were only California dreamin’ for four nights, but time in this state always leaves us wondering “Why don’t we live here?” (Don’t worry, moms, we’re not serious). The weather, beaches, and laid-back vibes are awesome and we always eagerly anticipate visits to CA. On this road trip, we prioritized seeing friends and family as we have lots of generous people up and down the coast who gave us places to stay and things to do. Here’s a peek at…
New Zealand is one of the places we’ve been most excited to visit; we heard great things about the people and expected the scenery to be awesome. It lived up to the hype and we had the most fun road trip here with my dad who flew to meet up with us for two weeks! What a treat! We rented a car from Rent-A-Dent in Christchurch (which is much nicer than it sounds) and spent two weeks exploring the South…
Our first afternoon in Sydney was spent wandering the neighborhood around the hostel and down to the harbor to get a view of the famous opera house and explore the city a little. For the first time in a long time, we ate at an Italian restaurant and we had noodles that weren’t fried with soy sauce. Our accommodation in Sydney was certainty an interesting place. The bed had a fitted sheet with cigarette burns and a top sheet with mold, which we…
We celebrated 100 days of traveling in beautiful Bali, Indonesia! We can’t believe we’ve been gone for over three months… time flies when you’re having SO MUCH fun! A scheduling snafu turned our 5 nights in Bali into only 3 nights. We accidentally confused some redeye flights for nights we’d have at the beach, only to realize later that we’d actually only given ourselves a super short visit. We stayed in the Seminyak beach area, one of the main tourist…
When Jen left us after our visit to Angkor Wat, we had to decide what to do next. We had about 2 weeks unaccounted for before heading to Australia and New Zealand. We thought about continuing on to see other parts of Cambodia and toyed with the idea of heading to Malaysia for some scuba diving. However, we kept hearing great things about Sri Lanka and decided to get out of Southeast Asia to experience something different. We are so glad we ended…
We loved Hoi An. Here were our top favorite activities: Food Food Tour By far our favorite part of Hoi An was the food. We did a food tour on our first day which was excellent. We were led by Pearl, a local who has a passion for food and was genuinely excited to show us all of the foods of Hoi An and the proper ways to eat them. We tried a total of 10 different items over the course of…
Our trip to Koh Tao started with a 5:00am taxi ride to the Lomprayah bus stop near Khao San Road where we took a 6 hour bus to Chumpon and a nearly two hour catamaran ferry to Koh Tao island. It was a long travel day and recent bad weather made the ferry ride particularly rough. Ferry staff started passing out plastic bags as soon as we sat down and many passengers around us put them to good use. Thankfully…
We spent three nights in Ao Nang, one of Thailand’s west coast beach towns in the Krabi area. It was beautiful. We spent most of our time living the beach bum life, relaxing on the beach and then reading by the hotel pool. One highlight was chartering a long tail boat to visit Tup and Poda Islands which are about 30 minutes from the mainland. It’s hard to put into words how beautiful it was, so we’ll just share some…
Kenting was recommended to us by my cousin Carolyn who lived in Taiwan for a year. We were originally thinking of staying in Taipei for a week and doing some day trips from there, but are so glad we instead opted to spend some time in this fantastic beach town! We arrived in Kenting around 6pm on a Wednesday to a bustling night market lining the main street where we stayed. After dropping our bags in our room, we went…