Living a Dream

If I can pare travel down into one thing and one thing only, it's that traveling successfully is a mindset. While going to cool places helps you enjoy it, you have to be OK with the fact that something will inevitably go wrong. Embrace it, or else you'll be pretty upset. Rain happens. Foggy, smoggy, hazy days happen. Awful tour guides in the group next to you happen. Trains run late, buses don't run at all, flights get cancelled. Open your mind a bit and realize that some of the most fun memories you'll have can happen when things are going completely wrong. Last night I was reading through my own notes from our 9 months abroad and realized just how much I had forgotten from a trip to a place called Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic. If you recognize the name, it's because you've read a lot of "10 European Towns You HAVE to See to Believe!" articles on god-knows-what website. Cesky Krumlov makes those lists because it looks like this . It's ...

Candidates are rounding into form ahead of the 2016 election – some are showing their sensibilities,  others are pulling out of the race. One question remains for all of them: Why in the world would you – or anyone else – want to be President of the USA? Simply by being elected, you’re guaranteeing that an entire political party will dislike you on general principal, and that’s not including independent voters and voters who would’ve preferred someone else from their own party. In fact, 1824 was the last time a president garnered more than 65% of the popular vote, and only about a half-dozen since then have cleared 55% . Simply stated, you’re lucky if 50% of the population actually wants you to be president. Beyond being generally disliked, let’s think about what a president can accomplish in the four years they’ll be in office. Let’s keep thinking about that… If Donald Trump is elected, he will not be able to garner the votes, pass legislation, pro...

Italy is a pretty cool place, as you might've noticed from all the photos I've been posting and blog entries I've made. With that in mind, we decided to try a road-trip weekend. The plan was to pick out some notable hill-towns in/around Tuscany and just drive. We'd also booked an Agriturismo for two nights because that's something we'd heard about doing. An Agriturismo is essentially a farm-house that rents out rooms. Some are more luxurious than others, including pools, hot-tubs, and more. Others focus on the agriculture aspect and are working farms where wine, jams, meat, fruit, and much more are produced. We opted for a small place outside of Florence because it featured an onsite dinner. We'd heard that the best part about Agriturismos were that they serve seemingly endless dinners for a flat-rate that gets added to the price of your room. We wanted that. The dinner did not disappoint, but that's going to show up in photos in a subsequent post. ...

After everything we covered on day 1 , day 2 , and day 3 , it's hard to imagine there'd be much left for us to do on day 4 in Rome. But, as the eternal city lives on, so does the adventure. The day started off rather gloomy and a bit rainy, but we marched toward the imperial forums again to just...soak it in. We took a walk around the Colosseum and up onto the Oppian hill, where the former "Golden Palace" of Nero stood, and now we saw remains of the Baths of Trajan . One remarkable thing about this area was a set of impossibly green birds, which a stranger pointed out to us on a few brief occasions. He kept trying to get closer, ultimately scaring them away, as if he thought they would just sit there and let him pat them on the head or something. Somehow, more notably, the thing we remember most about this was that there was a man walking a golden retriever, but the golden retriever believed it was a lion. It walked more proudly than any dog I've ever seen: Ch...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about hosting people on AirBnB and how it's been really cool to trust people and meet strangers who are moving around in the world. To revisit the topic, it's a pretty eye-opening thing. One of our first guests was a family of four. They had spent the past several weeks at the woman's parents' house in Parma (that's about 15 minutes from our house, for those who don't know) and just needed to get out and be a little closer to the city for a couple of days before they moved to the Congo. To provide a little more insight, this was a girl from Parma and her husband who she met in Madagascar while she was teaching English. They now have two unbelievably well-behaved (and adorable) children who were about to stomach a 24+ hour trip from Cleveland to Newark to Brussels to Kinshasa, which is the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The husband was from Guinea (that's in west Africa) and before they departed, he ga...

Yeesh. Rome is exhausting. We already covered day 1 here and day 2 here , now we're on day 3, and then there's a day 4 next week. I would've loved to have crammed this all into one post, but there's just so much to see and so much to say because, hi, it's Rome and there are millions of things to say. On what we knew would be another tiring day of endless walking, we left the hotel around 8:00 and made way toward the Vatican. We'd inquired about tours, and most folks agreed that tours were the best bet: You could skip lines, breeze through the museum seeing the highlights, pop into the Sistine Chapel, and then they drop you off inside St. Peter's - and during all of that you would hear information about the history of it all from a professional tour guide. We planned to do this. On our way we strolled past the Quirinale, which is like the Italian White House, although not terribly impressive when you consider what else is in Rome. We then passed Trevi Fou...