We’re halfway through our stay in Tirana, so it is time for my customary “We’re Home” post. Unfortunately, we don’t love Tirana, so it doesn’t feel much like home, other than our wonderful Airbnb. Chad asked on our walk the other day if it was really worth it to do this post or do just…

One of our goals with this leg was to not do any flights other than our flight to Europe and our flight home. We knew we’d start in Sofia and end up in Rome, slowly making our way via buses, trains, and ferries. Our other constraint was a desire to be in Europe for about…

As I said in my We’re Home post, we had high expectations for Bansko and they were exceeded. That remained true throughout the remainder of our one-month stay. In many ways, our last two weeks were a lot like our first two weeks, except for our two-night trip to Plovdiv, which I wrote about in…

Our third Christmas gift of the year (following the sports/event badminton match in Vietnam and the science/attraction animal cafes in Japan) was a two-night trip to Plovdiv covering the categories of arts and overnight.  Plovdiv was an obvious choice for this, having been selected by the EU as 2019’s European Capital of Culture. It has…

When we decided years ago to do a long stay in the Bulgarian town of Bansko, visiting the capital city Sofia was an afterthought. We knew we’d need to enter Bulgaria through Sofia, so we might as well spend a few days checking it out. But having not loved the Romanian capital Bucharest when we…