Cities & Culture

With Bratislava being a scant one hour from Vienna, it’s a common day trip for visitors to the Austrian capital. We therefore decided to make an overnight stop in Slovakia’s capital, on the way to Budapest, to see what the … Read More

Back in Vietnam, we met Alena, a girl traveling on our bus out of Ho Chi Minh City who was from Austria but studying and traveling in Vietnam. After running into her again while wandering around in Da Lat one … Read More

Our late night arrival in Prague was made easier by our AirBnB host, who picks up her guests for free from the local train and bus stations. After arriving in a lot of cities and hauling bags on foot, or … Read More

Our arrival in Krakow was immediately greeted with evidence of the World Youth Day in progress. Thousands of people crowded bustling sidewalks, many wearing brightly hued backpacks in one of the primary colors, with the letters SDM (the abbreviation for … Read More

While visiting Khao Yai National Park in Thailand, we met a couple, Adam and Ania, with their two young daughters, from Warsaw. After randomly running into them again in a coastal town – a couple weeks later and several hundred … Read More

About a month before we packed up our lovely little apartment in Cary, NC and headed out on this great adventure, we met a fellow resident named Vilma at the annual Christmas social. We’d all lived in the apartment community … Read More

Originally, we had planned to travel from Moscow to Istanbul, then work our way north and west as we explored eastern Europe. Unfortunately, a failed military coup and resulting formal declaration of a state of emergency left the country unstable … Read More

We pulled into the Moscow train station and set off towards the station entrance with our new Finnish friends. We chatted and walked in the bright sunshine when suddenly, the daughter interjected, “did that say Stone?” I wheeled around and … Read More

Naturally, while in China, we had to see the Great Wall. In an effort to escape the crowds, we signed up for two days of hiking with an organization called Beijing Hikers, whose trips tend to move outside of the … Read More

Our journey to Beijing was a long, 35-hour train ride from Hanoi, spanning two nights. It started off rocky when the person arranging our tickets was late dropping them off, leaving a cluster of us frantic and wondering whether we’d … Read More