Our departure from the U.S. this time included closing the book on one part of our life that has been there since we met. In 2009, long before I met Sue, I bought a very shiny, dark red Saab 93 convertible. It was first my, then our go to car. Sue had a very sensible …
Category: Travel
Summer Sped By
OK, I admit that I did have a bit of time in which I could have been writing a blog, but we've just been living summer life. An uneventful drive from Chicago to Maryland kicked off the final segment of our U.S. tour before we return to Valencia. We took two days for the drive, …
Hosting a Friend in Valencia
We don't collect a lot of souvenirs. Really just fridge magnets. I sometimes wonder what the total weight of our fridge magnets is, but we buy them because individually they are light and small. This is the long way around to saying that what we do collect is people — friends. On our fraught trip …
The Start of Our Long Stay in Valencia
We arrived one week ago today. It is the start of a one-year, and maybe longer, stay experiment, who knows. Last year we decided that we wanted to move to Valencia for a somewhat indeterminant amount of time. We tried to do this a couple of years ago, but the bureaucracy simply ground us down …
A Very Getto Wedding
Last Friday we left Chicago and started our progression to Valencia. We left Chicago the last Friday in March and headed to Los Angeles for our nephew’s wedding. He and his now wife live in Chino Hills, but we decided to fly in and out of LAX because we preferred a direct flight and wanted …
It Has Been a While…
It has been forever since we have written a post. Sorry everyone, sometimes life gets in the way and we lose a bit of momentum to keep up with the blog. A Quick Recap Since our last post, we left Athens and headed to England, with a quick stop in Valencia to set up a …
A Walk Around the Acropolis
A week ago Saturday we decided that we would take it easy. We started by walking from our AirBnB to the National Garden. It is one of the few large green spaces in Athens, but it was not what we expected. We thought it was going to be a botanic gardens with curated displays of …
Our First Few Days in Athens
We arrived in Athens after a quick flight from Budapest on Monday afternoon. The cities could not be more different. Budapest is very green with mid-age and younger buildings set around the meandering Danube. It is a stately European city with wide streets and lots of green space. Athens is hot, dry, seemly unplanned and …
The Budapest Quick Tour
We don't often do a three-day tour of a place that probably warrants more because we have the luxury of taking the time, but we decided to squeeze Budapest in on Labor Day weekend — between Prague and Athens. An extra day would have been good, but you just can't do everything. We arrived Friday …
Four Years and Counting
It has now been exactly four years since we kicked off The Happy Idiots tour by traveling to catsit for Seuss in Paris. Wow, time flies when you are having fun. We have done so much, seen so many incredible places , learned a few (or maybe a lot) of lessons the hard way and …