Category - Travel

MomentsTravel

Dining with the Stars (Bergen, Norway)

Having eaten all the pickled herring we can manage during our time in Norway, we’re in Peppe’s Pizza, an “American style” restaurant a bit off the beaten track in downtown Bergen. In the end, the “American style” here refers only to crust types:...

August 13, 2015
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240 views
4 min read
Travel

MillionMileMark’s Actual Engagement Index

I propose the “Actual Engagement Index” — a way to rate the quality of a bus or van tour of any size not by what sites are visited … but by establishing a ratio between the time you spend engaged with a site vs. the time you spend getting there. I...

August 8, 2015
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3 min read
Travel

A Place Called Home (Torshavn, Faroe Islands)

“Wherever we go, we will go together, and I will be your home.” — from our wedding vows What does home mean to you? For more than seven thousand years, people have called the Shetland Islands home. The more ancient the people, the less we know about...

August 6, 2015
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536 views
4 min read
Travel

Untouristed (Eskifjorour, Iceland)

Tourists, the people primarily responsible for converting charming destinations into tourist traps (cough San Antonio cough), often complain that they want to go somewhere that “isn’t quite so touristed.” We found such a place yesterday:...

August 6, 2015
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5 min read
Travel

Cliffs of Vestmanna (Faroe Islands)

The bus drops us in front of the tiny tourist office in Vestmanna, a village in the remote Faroe Islands. There’s not much inside — a restaurant serving fish soup, a gift shop selling plush puffins. Out back, a pier. At the pier, a tiny boat. Our...

August 5, 2015
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5 min read
Travel

Duncan’s Island Tours (Prince Edward Island, Canada)

We had just one day in the Canadian port of Charlottetown, and I didn’t want our memories of Prince Edward Island to be limited to glimpses of the coast through a smeary Holland America tour bus window. On top of that: most folks on our cruise were...

July 16, 2015
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6 min read
Travel

Twenty-Three Years and One Million Miles

Before I met my husband, Clyde, I had been on a jet only once. About four years into our relationship, we discovered our shared passion for travel on our very first international vacation (to Thailand, Singapore, and China). Fast forward a couple of...

May 26, 2015
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2 min read
Travel

A Tale of Two Tour Buses (Nova Scotia, Canada)

We’re on a Holland America “shore excursion” — a bus tour, headed for Lunenburg, Canada. If you know me at all, you’ll know I loathe most Holland America bus tours. The worst of them have certain features in common: Commentary by clueless guides...

May 24, 2015
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5 min read