After Smash and Stephen left we needed to leave the Schengen region immediately. So we made our way through Spain, flying into Madrid, taking a bus down to Valencia and then flying out of the Schengen. After a brief layover in Bulgaria, we flew onto Dubai. Dubai is a beautiful, modern and wildly diverse city. It was a blast, but a little more expensive than the places we like to stay so we only stayed one night. We did visit the mall with the ski lift inside (it cost about $80 for a one day pass, so we skipped the actual skiing) [...] Continue Reading

Lisbon was easily one of my favorite cities- it has this great, laid back vibe, tons of fresh seafood, plenty of winding, adorable cobblestone streets, the people are friendly, the views are spectacular and the weather was perfect! By itself, it was wonderful, but then Smash and Stephen came to visit and made a great trip to Lisbon into an epic trip to Lisbon!! [...] Continue Reading

Lyon was so, so wonderful (and, so delicious!). After almost a month and a half of 2-3 night stays we were very happy to call Lyon home for a full 10 days. Yes, it got boring, but that was part of the charm! Instead of waking up and packing, we woke up and relaxed. We went for walks in the amazing and highly entertaining Parc tete d'or and went to cooking class and ate baguettes and cheese and it was wonderful. This is not going to be a particularly exciting post, because it was not a particularly exciting week, instead it was restful and relaxing [...] Continue Reading

Perhaps somewhat against our better judgement, we decided to head to the Czech Republic after we left Budapest. We had already made reservations (non refundable) at several pensions and booked a flight from Prague to Geneva. But even then we thought about changing our plans and heading to Croatia and for a long time we were back and forth, first arguing one way and then the other. We had not officially made up our mind until the day before we left Budapest. In the end, we decided we already had reservations and might as well [...] Continue Reading

Nathan's flight was supposed to get in around 1:10pm, and we wanted to meet him at the airport so we took the train that arrived in Vienna a little after 11am. We checked into our hotel, grabbed some lunch and headed to the airport. As we were heading to the airport we got a text from Nathan saying his flight from Frankfurt was delayed for an hour while the plane waited to get de-iced. Well, at least we will be early we thought. By another unfortunate stroke of luck, we had planned on the train ride taking 45 minutes, and it only took about 15 minutes (to be fair, it was an educated guess as the lady at our hotels reception told us it would take 45 minutes). So we ended up at [...] Continue Reading

Our final stop on our Christmas market tour was Nuremberg, Germany. We spent 4 full nights there (although we did switch hotels), which was a really nice change of pace. Nuremberg had a really great Christmas market, but to be honest, there was so much more to see and do that we only spent a limited amount of time at the market. We mostly kept to within the beautiful, old walled city. Perhaps old is not the right word- Nuremberg was heavily bombed during WWII and most of the real old walled city was destroyed, so it is probably more accurate to say that we spent most of our time in the beautiful, relatively new walled city [...] Continue Reading

Our train to Augsberg was a bit of a party train. It seemed like we were the only people who didn't have a six pack of beer, or even a crate like some of the groups. When we arrived in Augsberg, the first thing we noticed was the police. There were tons of them, all over the train station all in riot gear (we are getting to be experts on the various riot gear of different countries- a good thing or a bad thing??). As far as we could tell, nothing was going on though- all seemed peaceful. We headed to our hotel where we were told that [...] Continue Reading

We have been traveling so much lately, which definitely has its pros and cons. On the pro side, we have gotten to the point where we can have everything we own packed up in less than 30 minutes. Thats actually saying quite a lot, I tend to just kind of explode when we get somewhere- I can have a hotel room covered in clothes and assorted other junk about 5 minutes after we walk in the door- so finding everything and condensing my mess to the size of a backpack in half an hour is actually pretty impressive [...] Continue Reading

The next stop on our Christmas market tour was Aachen. We took a train from Dusseldorf to Koln and then caught another train to Aachen. The whole trip only took a little more than an hour. Our first train left Dusseldorf at 10:58. We arrived at the train station a little after 10:30thinking we had plenty of time- we should have had plenty of time. We were walking through the train station remarking on how wonderful train travel is, how easy and stress free and even though we had plenty of time we should probably find our platform. We consulted the time table closest to us and saw that the train leaving at 10:58 that went through Koln left from platform 9 3/4 [...] Continue Reading