Living a Dream

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...

Ever heard of Lecco? No, you haven't. We only heard of it because it was the destination of a regional train in Milan. We secondarily heard of it because it's the 2nd biggest town on Lake Como, where we'd been a couple weeks earlier. But this was January, and the same reasoning held up as when we went to Como; if it's January and it's warm enough to get by in a long-sleeve tee, you'd best get outside and enjoy it. So we booked a train to Lecco for the day and decided to do some hiking. It was wonderful. First view of Lecco The town itself was very similar to other towns we'd been to. It had a main walking street with loads of shops, butchers, cheeseries, and high-end clothing retailers. It had a waterfront park area where folks would stroll for what seemed like hours on end. It had all you might want, and then it also had a weirdly large number of teens, but we'll get back to that. We started toward the nearest mountain, knowing that there...

I'm just as upset about that title as you are. Bellinzona, Switzerland. Ever heard of it? Of course you haven't - neither had I. We found out about this place because it was one stop past aforementioned Lugano on the train, and it looked just heavenly in photos. It has three main castles from medieval times that are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it's nestled between the Alps, so it seemed like a great place for our first-engaged-getaway. We hopped on the train early Saturday and arrived in town to be pleasantly greeted with a huge open-air street market, which has reportedly taken place every Saturday for the past 500 years. How cool is that? Almost by mistake, we stumbled into the first castle and promptly strolled in/around/through it for a good hour before booking it back to the hotel to drop our things off and run back to the other castles. Of course, because it's a beautiful town in the mountains, there's also a river that we had to cross betwee...

As many of you know, this whole experience has given the two of us opportunities that we never imagined in our wildest dreams. Everyone has been asking, so I'm finally going to start writing about the specific travel experiences, and I'll start with our first one. (you should know that I've been keeping a travel journal that's currently 65,000 words/105 MS word pages long and counting, with at least 10 trips left to add. Soooo if any of you know anything about the publishing world, we should talk) Before we left the States, any overtime work or a big sale at work would be followed by "That's a trip to Switzerland!" Lugano, Switzerland is just across the border from Milan, a whopping 50 minutes away via train. This was our goal for the first place to whimsically go. We arrived in Milan on a Thursday and walked around the city a tad. We walked around it a lot more on Friday. On the way home we stopped at the main railway station...and we bought tickets t...