Writing these posts so many months after the experience has required a bit of detective work. Luckily I keep a lot of records and between my daily family emails, expense log, and photo time stamps, I’ve been generally able to recreate each day. We visited Arezzo on October 28, nearly four months ago.  Arezzo Arrival…

Our second daytrip from Perugia was to the medieval Tuscan town of Siena. Although it is not on the same train line as Perugia, we were able to book an 80-minute Flixbus for 7 a.m. with a return at 7:10 p.m. It was a long day, but provided plenty of time to see the main…

One reason we chose Perugia as our home base for Italy was its access to many other great Italian towns we really wanted to see. Our list was long and so we got started almost right away four days after our arrival in Perugia in mid-October. The very top of our list was Assisi, home…

It feels like a long time ago that we left Tirana for Italy on October 6, because it was. Over 100 days ago in fact. That’s how far behind I am on this blog. But I’m going to do my best to remember and capture the wonderful time we had during our first days in…

My We’re Home post from Tirana was a bit of a downer. We really didn’t love the city and it had quite a few challenges. I’m sorry to say that the second half of our time there did not get much better, though I think we coped better. We certainly explored more than our first…

Our first two weeks in Perugia have been a true mix of magical and mundane. On the magical side, we’re living in a charming apartment on the top floor of a 17th century building with rustic wood beams and a stunning view. The history of Perugia goes back to the Etruscans (300 BC) and the…

I’d read great things about Lake Ohrid on the blogs of other full-time travelers, so it was a no-brainer for us to stop and spend a few days there as we made our way to Albania from Bulgaria. It definitely lived up to my high expectations. The lake itself is huge and beautiful and the…

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…