We really enjoyed our 5 nights in the capital of North Macedonia, but Skopje is bit weird. The history of this town really is interesting. We have been accustomed in our Eastern Europe trip to seeing ancient cities with a mix of old ruins and architectural styles from each era. Skopje is an old city…
Author: Beacon Bill
Semi-Nomadic Travelers
Sofia, Bulgaria
We spent our last week in Bulgaria in the capital of Sofia and it was hard not to think about how our weeks in Romania compared with our weeks in Bulgaria. The countries are very similar. Both are struggling with high prices and low wages, high emigration, and trying to overcome the troubles of authoritarian…
Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Plovdiv is Bulgaria’s second largest city (population ~ 500,000) after the capital city of Sofia. We often enjoy seeing the second cities of Europe because they are many times less touristy but still have enough attractions that give us a sense of the “identity” of a country. Plovdiv had a walkable downtown surrounded by 7…
Free Miles, Stacking, and Capital One Offers
Years ago, before I knew much about travel hacking, I attached my Alaska Airlines account to my Safeway account. I got free miles for years just by grocery shopping and didn’t think much about it. They don’t do that anymore; however I’ve been on a journey of learning way more about earning points and miles…
Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
Trains in this part of the world aren’t quite the same as Western Europe. Romania and Bulgaria still have trains but the infrastructure is still “in work” so they often have to go very slow. We don’t like long transportation days so we put in some shorter stops to break up the long train days….
Brasov and Transylvania Castles
On our 3rd week in Romania, we moved to Brasov which is another town in Transylvania, with a very beautiful old town with some fantastic architecture. If we hadn’t spent a week in Sibiu we would have been blown away by the atmosphere of the pedestrian-only downtown. On the first day we took a “free”…
Sibiu, Romania
The cuteness of this town caught us a bit by surprise. Yeah, we had heard that Sibiu was a beautiful medieval town and that’s why we decided to spend a week here. But, the charming architecture of the small town’s 2 large squares was really surprising. All of the buildings had large steep roofs and…
Back to Europe to… Bucharest, Romania
I haven’t posted for a while because we had been taking a little break from traveling. We spent a couple of weeks back in America seeing friends and family. Our house is currently rented out so we mostly stayed at our family beach cabin on Stretch Island. It was a little cold for our bodies…
Finding the sun in Fethiye, Turkiye
One of our goals in our nomadic lifestyle is to avoid bad weather. We work at planning our travels so we can avoid wearing long pants, or even worse…. Socks!!! I enjoy living in shorts, T shirts and sandals most of the year. We also enjoy looking at the weather back in Seattle once in…
Antalya, Türkiye
It still feels wrong to spell it “Türkiye” instead of “Turkey” but that is now what it is called, so we should get used to it. We timed our trip to this country to coincide with a big political mess. The mayor of Istanbul has been arrested on corruption charges and everyone is blaming the…
Vientiane, the capital city of Laos
Sometimes, it takes a bit to understand a city. We had been in Laos for 2 weeks so we understand the food, the money and a little bit of the culture. We had planned 4 nights in Vientiane to finish out our time in Laos and complete our 3 months in Asia. We had 3…
Are hotels the answer?
One of the reasons that we are able to travel the world is because we can stay in short term rentals. The invention of Airbnb opened up the world to a bunch of us that prefer to stay in places with kitchens and couches and really “live” in another country. Last month, Joe Gebbia, the…
Long Stay in Luang Prabang, Laos
Yes, this is long for us. 11 nights. We stayed in a resort with a pool for the first 4 nights, then left for a stay in the small town of Nong Khiaw and came back to Luang Prabang for 7 nights in an Airbnb. This town is the main tourist hub in Laos and…
Nong Khiaw, Laos
We actually started our time in Laos by flying from Siem Reap, Cambodia to the town of Luang Prabang. We stayed 4 nights in Luang Prabang and then took a van through 4 hours of potholes to the small town village of Nong Khiaw. We will be returning to Luang Prabang for another week so…
My 2025 Performance Management
Some blog posts I write are for my family, so they know where we are and don’t need to worry about us. Some blog posts I write are for sharing cool places around the world to hopefully inspire people to travel to new places. Some blog posts are for my retired nomad friends where I…