We have heard a lot about the difficulties that popular tourist cities are having with the massive number of tourists. We have seen it in several places but it was really apparent during our stay in Porto. We were in Porto from October 8-10th in 2018 and it was a different atmosphere than our stay…
Tag: Europe
Underrated Zaragoza, Spain
We couldn’t find an easy train or bus from San Sebastian to Zaragoza so we decided to rent a car. Spain’s train network is vastly improved but still “in work”. We are still traveling with Paul and Kara and it makes a lot more sense to rent a car when traveling with 2 couples. This…
Basque Country with Paul and Kara
Yep, it isn’t just the 2 of us for a couple of weeks. We are 4 once again – Meg’s brother Paul, and his Spain-loving wife Kara, are joining us for a couple of weeks exploring the Basque Region of Northern Spain. We really like traveling with people and were excited that they wanted to…
Dublin, Ireland
We are back in Europe!! Well… at least Ireland to start. We just finished up 4 days overcoming our jetlag and seeing the sights of Dublin. This is a new country for Meg, but I had been here 35 years ago for a long weekend, during my study abroad experience in college. That was before…
Off Again!!
Our summer in Seattle has come to an end. It seems like time flew too fast but we were able to see a lot of people and do a lot of things in our 2 months here this year. We are ready to take off again. This time we are heading to Ireland, Spain and…
Corfu, Greece- Last Stop before Seattle
M likes to spend our last week before returning home at a lazy beach location. It doesn’t always work out but it was perfect for this trip. This trip through Eastern Europe did not have many beaches but the last couple of weeks has made up for that. Our week in Sarande, Albania was great…
The Albanian Riviera
I am not sure why so many countries get to have their own “Riviera”, but Albania has one too. The beaches are mostly as good as many of those that we have seen in other Rivieras. We stayed for a week on the beach in the center of the town of Saranda, Albania, and didn’t…
Albania’s Hill Towns- Berat and Gjirokaster
We just spent some time in a couple of very scenic Albanian hill towns. Berat is the “City of Windows” and Gjirokaster is the “City of Stone”. They both had a lot of windows, a lot of stone and a very sweaty hike to the fortress in the middle of town. Both of them are…
Tirana, Albania
This is the 4th new country for us in the past 2 months and we really like being able to compare countries and their capital cities. Albania was one of the most isolated Eastern Bloc countries during the Soviet era. They really kept a tight locked border that included not allowing tourists as well as…
Ohrid, North Macedonia
Ohrid is a beautiful lakeside tourist town in Macedonia that I took a lot of pictures in even though we only stayed here for 4 nights. It is on Lake Ohrid, which is a lake that is on the border between Macedonia and Albania. One third of the lake is actually in Albania. The beach…
Skopje, Macedonia is just strange…
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…
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”…