This article is just a short description of our room at Nayara Gardens. I booked the Rainforest Pool Villa here because we wanted our own private space, and the resort was running a book 7 nights, pay for 5 deal. About half of the rooms at Nayara Gardens have a personal plunge pool. All of the rooms at Nayara Spring and Nayara Tented Camp have one. Our room was absolutely enormous, and easily one of the largest rooms we have…
Amor Loco restaurant is located at Nayara Springs within the sprawling Nayara resort in Costa Rica. This restaurant definitely wins for funkiest decor. Nayara Springs is the adults only section of the resort, and this restaurant is definitely geared towards romance. The vibe was like a hookah-lounge mixed with a steakhouse or bistro. There were plush velvet couches and chairs, purple, red and blue lighting, along with photos of all sorts of celebrities both old-timey and current, plastered along the…
Henry’s Bar up at the Nayara Tented Camp is a very cool and chill place to hang out any time of day. The best part about it, though, was the special Rum Tasting that we booked there. Our bartender and teacher, Joseph, was amazing. He was super nice, chatty, and very knowledgable and passionate about rums, and spirits in general. He was definitely one of our favorite staff members the whole week. The spread of different rums was intimidating, but…
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…