Europe
September 2023–hiking the Dolomites, my 4th Oktoberfest, + my 30-yr high school reunion
September made the long hours of August worth the toil. On Labor Day, we flew first class to Munich–the first time we’ve been able to fly east across the Atlantic and actually lie down + sleep. I loved Bolzano, Italy, the town that can’t decide if it’s Austrian or Italian, […]
June 2023 — Greece
We left Memorial Day weekend on a direct flight to Athens. We attended an AirBnB “experience” during which a man in a toga taught us that the penalty for adultery in ancient Greece was “radishes in the ass.” We learned more than that about the ancient Greeks, but that’s what […]
November 2022
November began with a legal conference before the Mrs and I flew to Copenhagen for our anniversary weekend, where we enjoyed some of the best restaurants in the world, closely following the stops enjoyed on Somebody Feed Phil’s Denmark episode. Then we saw Billy Joel + Lionel Ritchie with friends […]
Spring Break in Norway (or Covid 2: Contagious Boogaloo)
Months ago, we rescheduled 2020’s spring break trip to Germany for April 2022, until we saw that such was unlikely to be feasible without lots of quarantining and doing nothing, so we pivoted to what appeared to be the least restrictive country we could visit in the waning Age of […]
How does one survive an indefinite vacation extension after a positive Covid test?
For the past 25 months, we’ve worried about the process for going places, seeing new countries, and pivoting when new restrictions prohibit our visiting said countries, but what if we were to make it somewhere overseas, have a great spring break of exploration and relaxation, only to be prohibited from […]
spring break in Italy: Rome
It was Saturday, April 6 when we woke up in Rome, and my kind bride had scheduled the most fitting activity I could possibly engage in at that moment in that place: gladiator training followed by a trip to the Coliseum. Why? Because Monday, April 6, 2009 was the first […]
spring break in Florence, Tuscany
We arrived by train in Florence and navigated the throngs of tourists toward our AirBnb, a unit requiring climbing several flights of wooden stairs with steep rises. Its exterior doorway opened onto a sidewalk maybe 6” wide before a curbed one-way street where Italian men liked to exceed 40 mph, […]
spring break in Italy: Venice
We arrived at the Milan train station at 7am and arrived in Venice just before 10. I couldn’t wait to lead my family out of the train station and toward the Grand Canal where we could stand and look across the water at the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited. […]
spring break in Italy: Milan
The children’s Christmas present this year was our first international Spring Break; we landed on April Fools Day in Milan and dropped off our bags at our AirBnB by the Galleria del Corso before walking 500 feet to the beautiful Milan Cathedral. We’d pre-booked tickets to explore the inside of […]