Kansas City sure was a surprising little trip for me. Coming from Chicago, one of the greatest cities on the planet, I usually have pretty low expectations for small towns especially in Middle America. Let me say, though, that Kansas City really blew me away! It’s hilly, there’s lots of parks and trees, it’s neighborhoody, everyone is super nice, and can also be very chic and fancy. You can really see a lot of what there is to be seen…
May, 2023 We had about 20 hours in Singapore on our way home from Bali to Chicago. I scheduled this long layover somewhat purposefully, because I’ve always wanted to see this Island City, and Noah was the only kid without a Michelin Star experience under his belt, and this was the place to do it. We arrived in Singapore around 3pm and we had to leave for the airport at 7am the next morning. It was going to be a…
May-June, 2023 The thing about planning a trip to Bali is that there are about a billion activities to do on the island. There are traditional temples and dances, hundreds of resorts and restaurants, water and land adventure activities and things you’ve never even heard, or thought of doing before! We were in Bali for seven nights, and this was my third time on the island. I really wanted to have a nice mix of land and water activities, try…
We spent 5 nights in Dublin, and this article will be my overview of the highlights of the trip. I’ll include links to my other articles if you are looking for more of a deep dive. We flew direct to Dublin from Chicago, a short 6.5-ish hour flight. Dublin is SO close to the east coast and middle America, it’s easy to simply spend a long weekend here. This was the original plan, but when booking with Marriott points, you…
This is going to be an article about our full 8-day Malta Itinerary, with a whole bunch of links to other articles and websites to help you plan your own amazing getaway! We went to Malta for our oldest daughter’s high school graduation trip (delayed one year due to COVID). Anna is a geography major at Augustana College, and thought that the capital of Valletta sounded cool, and didn’t want to go anywhere “basic”. I’m kind of going all out…
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…
My brother and I were always massive fans of the Ghostbusters franchise. I remember when he was a little kid, he would run around with his proton pack with his buddies in the neighborhood busting ghosts. We watched the two original movies so many times, I’m pretty sure we have them both memorized. One summer, in 2009, we decided that we would create our own tour around New York City, checking out all the filming locations we could find from…
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…
Gozo is Malta’s second-largest island. It’s known for a laid back “country” vibe, cool beaches, and scenery, so we decided to spend a day here while on our trip to Malta. We rented a car, so we got up super early in Valletta and drove about 45 minutes to the Ferry terminal at the northern tip of Malta. We put our car right on the ferry for the 15-20 minute ride across the channel to Gozo. The ferry itself is…