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This post details a trip to Belize (San Ignacio, San Pedro, ATM Cave), as well as a day trip to the Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala.

“He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.” -Victor Hugo Stepping off the train from London, my first impression of Paris is that it’s hot… and humid. The air is like an ocean, and we swim through the moisture to our hotel down the road. It takes a half hour, and not figuring out some sort of transportation may have been a mistake. Along the way, we pass through clouds of cigarette smoke, and I think b

This travel journal details three days spent exploring London.

“The Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!” -Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”* In lieu of a “Welcome” sign, your arrival in Florence is marked by an increase in the amount of graffiti on walls running alongside the train tracks. At home in Los Angeles, dedicated crews remove such tagging in a perpetual game of Whack-a-Mole. Here, though, no one seems to mind, and you have to wonder if the oldest layers of paint date b

We start the day in Siena with a continental breakfast – the standard, uninspired fare of hardboiled eggs, cold cuts, cheese, bread. Evermore important, though, we get the party started by pounding some machine-made espresso, then we head outside. The van pulls up right on schedule, and we are the second couple in. We stop at two more hotels up the road, then begin the 45 minute trek along winding roads of Tuscany. Eventually, the medieval towers of San Gimignano start to pee

“Tuscany looks like what all of Italy should look like.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (attributed) We stare out the train window as the green, rolling hills glide by, somewhere between Rome and our next destination north, the Tuscan city of Siena. Along the way, we occasionally spot old, crumbling castles perched atop hills in the distance, slowly being claimed by nature. Small villages hug mountain ridges, leaving me to wonder how they en

This post details a day trip to Naples and Pompeii from Rome, during our summer excursion through Italy.

The big news today is that it’s been 75 years since Nazi Germany formally accepted surrender against the Allied Forces, marking the end of World War II in Europe. During vacation in 2017, we were exposed to ghosts of the past while visiting Hungary, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, and Poland. I will dive into our overall experiences in those countries at a later time. For now, I want to commemorate the anniversary by sharing some of what we saw and learned during our travel

This post details the Rome portion of our summer travels through Italy.