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…
Tag: Europe
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…
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…
Nafplio, Greece with Friends
We have been in Europe for almost 2 months and have not seen a familiar face since we left Seattle. We like traveling with each other but sometimes it gets a little old just talking only to your spouse. That changed in Nafplio, Greece when we had 2 sets of visitors. We love to meet…
Stoupa, Greece – Our new favorite European beach town
If you saw my post last week about Sardinia, I was complaining that we didn’t quite match with the beach town of Olbia. It wasn’t what we were looking for in a relaxing beach week. I felt a little bad for complaining so much, so now I need to write a blog post praising a…
UNESCO World Heritage Sites
We often seek out the UNESCO World Heritage Sites while we are traveling and we are rarely disappointed. If you aren’t aware, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) has a list of over 1200 sites in the world that are exceptional natural wonders or they are examples of important cultural or historic places…
Sardinia- not as planned
We have been in France for over a month, and our feet haven’t set foot in a swimming pool or on a beach. We knew would be ready for a beach week and set aside 5 days in Olbia, Sardinia for some beach relaxation time. We took a ferry from Corsica and found a bus…
Corsica, France – Bastia and Bonifacio
Yep, we are island hopping in Europe. First stop – Corsica. It is technically part of France but it really isn’t that near to France. We took an overnight ferry from Toulon (near Marseilles), from 6:30pm to 7:00am the next morning. We are not “cruisers” so this was kinda new for us. We rented a…
Strasbourg, Beaune, and Dijon
After our hikes, we really should have put in a week or two of downtime to rest up and slowly get back into our regular tourist mode. Instead we spent 3 nights in Strasbourg and then 4 nights in Beaune. In Beaune, we actually spent 1 day renting a car to look for some family…
Do we like “thru-hiking” in Europe?
We just finished our trial thru-hikes to see if are ready for doing a Camino de Santiago. I’m sure everyone is on the edge of their seat to see what we are now thinking :>) First, we need to try to define the terms. In America, I have done a lot of “backpacking” in Washington…
Hiking the Alsace Wine Route
Yep, another long hike… but this time on the other side of France in the Alsatian region. Alsace is a very German part of France because this area has been part of Germany in the past. Many people still speak German and the regional food also is a bit similar with a lot of pretzels,…