Category: Travel

What do you do when you save a bunch of money and retire at 33? Spend months at a time traveling the world of course!

This summer we spent eight weeks exploring the temples, palaces, and waterways of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand in Southeast Asia. 

In today’s article, we cover the first segment of the trip where we visited two cities in Vietnam. After a looooong flight from the East Coast of the USA, we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon, where we stayed for eight nights. Then we visited Can Tho, Vietnam in the Mekong River Delta region for a three night stay. After leaving the Mekong Delta, we headed to Phnom Penh, Cambodia (with a short one night pit stop in Ho Chi Minh City en route).

To celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary, we visited Mexico City for an 11 day vacation (without kids!). We have visited the city several times before, so we didn’t plan on hitting the tourist trail too hard while in the city. 

On most days we spent a few hours sightseeing and many more hours relaxing, dining, and indulging in other forms of laziness. Some days were more successfully lazy than others, but overall we took it easy. 

While in the city, we visited the museums and colonial buildings in the historic center of town, toured a half dozen districts on the edge of town, and took a day trip to the pyramids at Teotihuacan.

Have you ever wondered what it is like to be shipwrecked on a deserted island?  Would you get bored? Would you starve? Die of dehydration?

Or would you thrive and prosper in your newfound isolation and make the most out of your (hopefully) temporary stay on the beach?

In a roundabout way, our one month trip to Freeport, Bahamas was inspired by this thought experiment. What would life be like in a relatively isolated section of a Caribbean island? Crystal clear water. White sand beaches. No people. No nearby restaurants or entertainment.

Are we crazy to voluntarily shipwreck ourselves in such a predicament?  I don’t think so. But we aren’t complete gluttons for punishment. We made sure to book a place with air conditioning and wifi (it is the 21st century after all).

The final stop on our nine week, fourteen city summer vacation across Europe brought us to Amsterdam, Netherlands for a quick three day stay before flying back to North Carolina (and home!).

While in Amsterdam we explored canals and rivers, centuries old streets and buildings, and some more modern spaces like the iconic OBA Amsterdam Public Library.

Read on to find out how we wrapped up nine weeks in Europe!

The thirteenth (and next to last) stop on our nine week, fourteen city summer vacation across Europe brought us to Koblenz, Germany.  The city of Koblenz sits at the confluence of the Mosel and Rhine River in the western part of Germany.

After spending most of the previous eight weeks of vacation in urban settings, we decided to give rural living a shot for a week.  We rented a spacious three bedroom apartment in a country house in the village of Mariaroth about 15 minutes from the center of Koblenz.

While staying near Koblenz, we visited the Eltz Castle, several villages in the Mosel and Rhine river valleys, and toured downtown Koblenz during what turned out to be a rather rainy week for us.  

As we near the end of the review of our nine week, fourteen city summer vacation across Europe, our twelfth stop brought us to Berlin, Germany for a week of history, culture, food, and friends.

Berlin was everything I expected and then some. Great summertime weather, nice people, minimal crowds, easy transit, good food, all with low prices (for a major European capital city).  I’d certainly rate Berlin a hidden gem on this basis.  My naive hypothesis is that Berlin is still a city in transition following World War II devastation and the post-war sundering of Berlin into East and West halves by the former USSR and the western Allies.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Germany reunited as one country shortly thereafter in 1990.  In today’s Berlin there are ample reminders of the turbulent past century in the form of museums, memorials, and preserved segments of the Berlin Wall. Though it’s hard to imagine anything bad actually happened when you’re sitting in a placid city park or strolling down the quiet riverfront.  Then you catch a glimpse of pockmarked walls and columns on old buildings and that makes you wonder if those were caused by bullets or an exploding shell that barely missed its mark.