Koh Tao is a island about the physical size of Anderson Island or Shaw Island in Washington state with only a few thousand people living fulltime on it. The only business is tourism, and the island is filled with backpackers and tourists escaping the cold of their countries for some days in the sun. Not…
Prachuap Khiri Khan
Don’t recognize this town?? It isn’t much of a tourist town. We just stayed here for a couple of nights to break up our trek from Bangkok to our first Thai Islands. We found a 3 hour bus here and booked a couple of nights at the biggest hotel in town – the Prachuap Grand…
4 Nights in Bangkok
After a week up North, we needed to check out Bangkok before laying around on the islands for the next few weeks. You can’t go to Thailand without seeing Bangkok and we had heard a lot of mixed info on what it was going to be like. Our son was here a few years ago…
Chiang Mai Thailand
We flew from Singapore to Chiang Mai to get started on the Thailand part of our winter travels. We spent a week in this Northern town which is a bit higher elevation than the other cities in Thailand so the weather is a bit more moderate. We had pleasant 80 degree days and 70 degree…
Go where it is warm…. or HOT!
We spent December in Seattle and it was great seeing our friends and family but we got tired of the cold and rain pretty quick. We were really ready to get somewhere where we didn’t need a raincoat to walk to the grocery store. Southeast Asia seemed like the perfect place to start 2023. First…
What is a Retired Nomad?
and how can I be one???? M and I have been drawn to the lifestyle of the Retired Nomad. We love to travel a lot, for extended times, and we strive to have a reduced stress life that comes with owning less stuff. We have learned a lot about this lifestyle and nomadic community and…
Travel Planning Next Level
We lived in Beacon Hill, a neighborhood in Seattle that is on the light rail line and less than 15 minutes to downtown Seattle. Beacon Hill is just a few restaurants, shops, a park, and a grocery store that happens to be next to metro station. This is the perfect location for us for our…
Traveling isn’t always perfect
We travel a lot and our friends and family are a bit jealous. But I have to remind everyone that we don’t have a stress free life. We have a lot of fun and see a lot of cool places, but sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes we are stupid or ignorant or sometimes we just…
Dear Hosts,
In 2022, we stayed in 25 different Airbnb’s for over 110 days and have learned a lot about what we are looking for in a stay, and how to find it by searching the listings. But it shouldn’t be so hard! It is usually a real challenge to identify if a place meets our requirements…
Rome and Home
The last stop on on the Europe22 trip is 5 nights in Rome. We didn’t really plan much before we got there because we have been there before and know our way around the big attractions. But this was a little problem because many of the places required buying advance tickets a couple weeks in…
Palermo, Sicily
By this time, we have stayed in 4 different Sicilian towns and visited several others and felt like we had a great feeling for Sicily, but to really say we have seen Sicily, we need to see the capitol. So, in our farewell to Sicily planned 8 days in the heart of the big city…
Trapani, Sicily
After our fantastic evening in Agrigento at the Valley of the Temples, we still had the rental car for another day to get to the other side of Sicily. Having a car enables us to find some off the beaten path things to do and M found us a good one. We went to Il…
Sunset in the Valley of the Temples. Agrigento, Sicily, Italy
We really prefer trains or buses for budget and carbon footprint reasons but sometimes they aren’t convenient to what we want to see. The Southern part of Sicily doesn’t have good transportation but it does have a lot of ancient Greek and Roman ruins that we really wanted to see. So we ended up renting…
Syracuse, Sicily, Italy
We just spent 4 days in an airBnB right in the old town of Syracuse. It was actually on the island of Ortigia which is where the pedestrian zone old town is. 2 bridges connect it to the mainland which is where the ancient ancient part of the city was. Syracuse used to be a…
Catania, Sicily, Italy
We have made it to Sicily! We took a train and ferry from Calabria and I mean we took a train onto the ferry. It was pretty cool. It was like a regular ferry boat but had no cars. Only trains. Our train split in half and the train cars that were going to North…