Ayla is the brand-new full service restaurant up at the Nayara Tented Camp at the Nayara Resort in Costa Rica. We ate here on one of our last nights, and considering that at home we are transitioning to a Mediterranean diet, and we recently ate at Galit in Chicago (check out my review here!) which serves very similar fare, eating at Ayla was definitely on the list for us. The ambiance at Ayla is glamping chic. Ayla is in a…
As I mentioned in my intro post here, there are three different resorts in one at the Nayara Resorts Grounds at the base of the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica. Each of those resorts has a different vibe, and there are also several pools you can choose to hang out at. There are also a group of hot springs pools between Nayara Gardens and the Tented Camp. We checked out most of the pools, and I break them all down…
We just got back from an amazing anniversary trip to Costa Rica, and this post is going to give you a bit of an overview of the resort and what we did there. In the weeks to come, I’ll be posting individual articles providing more detail about the important stuff: excursions and activities, the pools, and the restaurants. I booked Nayara Gardens on a stay 7, pay 5 deal, and it’s a great deal! Everyone was so surprised that we…
5. Pensativo House Hotel, Antigua, Guatemala Pensativo House Hotel was a great little find in one of my favorite cities for the year 2022 – Antigua, Guatemala (check out my Top Five cities list here!). We came to this city and this hotel before I started this blog, in February of 2022, so there’s no formal review of it on this site, but Pensativo House deserves the Number Five spot on this list for a couple reasons. First, it was…
We came to Detroit for a quick, overnight trip, for the primary purpose of viewing the Caravaggio painting, “Martha and Mary Magdalene” at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This gave us the perfect opportunity to stay at a hotel that I’ve been wanting to check out for a while – the Shinola Hotel. Shinola is a high-end watch and leather goods brand based out of Detroit, and they have brought a lot of attention to the city. I think this…
We stayed at the Shelbourne for five nights from October 20-25, 2022. I chose this place for a ton of reasons, but the number one reason was to use up a bunch of Marriott Bonvoy points that had accumulated over the pandemic. Because I was using old travel credits for the flights for this trip, I wanted the trip to be as free as possible, so I cashed out about 250,000 Marriott points to stay at one of the most…
How can I have a travel blog and not talk about my incredible Honeymoon in 2016? Well, it has been a while, but my memories from the Seychelles are probably some of my most vivid still. I had dreamed of going to the Seychelles for my Honeymoon ever since I was in High School. Sometime in the mid-1990’s the Chicago Tribune’s Travel section had a massive article about the Seychelles with a big banner photograph of the Anse Source D’Argent…
Welcome to Part 2 of our amazing family getaway to Belize. If you haven’t read Part 1, check it out here! We started off at Blancaneaux Lodge, but this article is about our stay at the Turtle Inn, our second Coppola Hideaway resort. On our way from Blancaneaux to Turtle Inn, we booked an excursion to St. Herman’s Cave to do some cave river tubing. After hiking for about 5 minutes through a flat, grassy forest, we arrived at the…
So we had a big giant trip to Paris planned with all four kids for the summer of 2020. COVID ruined those plans, but we were hopeful to rebook for 2021, which I did, and then I cancelled again since the rules were still weird about vaccines, etc. The summer of 2021 quite possibly may have been the last summer where we could snag all four kids and go on one vacation together since our oldest was starting college in…
Domus Zamittello is a boutique hotel located just within the City Gate of Valletta in Malta. We stayed there for eight nights from August 20-28, 2022. As you might know, I always prefer to stay in boutique hotels over big name chains, and honestly, in Valletta, there is pretty much only boutique hotels, so there were a ton to choose from. Some of the surrounding cities like Sliema and St. Julians have Marriotts and Hiltons, but I am super glad…