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Chris is giving a lovely day-by-day account of this vacation, so I think I’m going to focus on the nuts-and-bolts of how we’ve pulled together this trip. Saturday, July 2nd We landed in Paris on July 2nd around 8am.  In France, I booked a 4-week stay in an honest-to-goodness chateau in Chris’ favorite wine village, Puligny-Montrachet.…

Berlin is a great European capital I had never visited.  We have friends in Berlin, so in thinking about how to get to Europe this summer, Chris expressed a desire to stopover in Berlin.  Fortunately, the one airline that flies directly between Chicago and Berlin is a OneWorld alliance member (Air Berlin) and economy award…

[Note: I was going to title this “Our European Adventure: 2016 Edition,” but I realized that we were in Europe earlier this year…] After months — nay, YEARS — of planning, we left Chicago on June 30, 2016.  We were laden down with the following: 1 Wine Check, packed with another Wine Check and a litter…

I’m the first to admit, we travel quite a bit.  So we’re practiced at preparing for trips: we can usually pack efficiently the night before departure.  We’re very good at packing light enough to just use carry-on luggage, so we waltz through security and customs at airports.  “Baggage claim” are bad words in my world!…

I’ve been helping friends plan their honeymoon and it’s been interesting to get their different perspectives on travel.  One of these friend’s perspective aligns nicely with mine: comfortable, but with room for experimentation, the unexpected, adventure.  The other friend leans more heavily towards the experience, with less concern about comfort. That’s not to say that…

Returning to our regularly scheduled programming… Seoul.  Chris has already written quite extensively about this trip, so I figure I can piggy-back on his (more contemporaneous) writings and just add my own thoughts. It was my first trip back in almost 30 years.  My memories of Seoul are very fuzzy, as I was 7 years old.  Mostly what I remembered were lots…

Maybe I won’t finish up on Asia after all?  Who knows.  I’m just not feeling the need to write on that trip right now. Instead, it occurred to me that it would be nice to have, for future reference, my thoughts on bucket list travel.  And since this blog is for me (since I’m pretty…

I’ll get back to posting about Korea and Hong Kong… probably.  Chris has been great about blogging based on notes that he wrote during the trip, so his account is more like a journal of the trip.  He’s done blogging at that trip (as well as blogging about the trip after that — we spend…

I normally like to travel with an eye towards learning what it’s like to live like a local. We often stay in apartments, shop for groceries, walk around to get a sense of the neighborhood, and try to gain perspective on a different culture. For our first trip to Asia, however, that’s completely getting thrown…

But before I get to Macau, let’s talk about the journey itself. PLANNING THE TRIP The original plan was to visit my dad in Seoul over Thanksgiving. I’m one of those people who really hates connections on flights.  I just want to get there, dammit.  Fortunately, I live in Chicago, which enjoys plenty of non-stop flights…