Our flight to Bergen arrived really late, but we were still able to see the mighty Norwegian Fjords from the air. We were so lucky to choose the hostel right above the loudest hostel in the city so since we couldn’t sleep we walked around to see the excitement but didn’t last long because we…
Stockholm Part 3: Opa Gamla Stan!
On the third day in the beautiful city of Stockholm, we woke up early to visit the palace located in the old town, also known as Gamla Stan. The old town was a few minutes walk from our hotel, passing by beautiful old cobblestone streets. We arrived at the Royal Palace and started our visit…
Stockholm Part 2: The Vasa and Beyond
And we are off with the second day in Stockholm waking up early to take one of the ferries to the museum island (Durjgarden). We decided to only take a One-Way ticket and walk back. The ride takes about 15 minutes of pure pleasure while we navigated the channels on this beautiful day. Our first…
Hallå Stockholm
Hello again, our dear readers. We just came back from a fantastic 2 week trip to Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. We are going to start the blog with Stockholm as the photos from Iceland still need some post-processing work. Here we go!! We took a very early flight from Reykjavik to Stockholm that arrived around…
I Want That Pottery
I finally had some time to continue with the New Mexico blog posts: Santa Fe. We woke up early to be able to visit the Native American bazzar of handcrafts that they set outside the Palace of the Governors. While Eitan awkardly stood there for 20 minutes, Sarah went to each individual seller to find…
Trippy Santa Fe
We decided to take a quick getaway to New Mexico for presidents day weekend! We got a promo deal while opening the Southwest Credit card where they gave us the companion pass for FREE!! This means that we can go anywhere Southwest airlines fly to, and get another person for free; which means we can…
The Life Outside The Strip: Red Rocks
On our last day (or what we thought was going to be our last day) we stopped on the famous Las Vegas billboard sign. There was a huuuge line to get a picture of it, but if you go to the side and you don’t mind that the sign is not perfectly centered, then you can avoid…
Eitan FOMO: Hoover Dam Edition
We planned for an early morning to beat the crowds at the Hoover Dam, but we made the costly mistake of stopping in a crowded restaurant on our way. Breakfast took 2 hours, so by the time we got close to the Dam, this was the traffic…. After a security check (after 9/11 they increased…
Where The Lights Go To Die
We started our morning with healthy fried chicken for breakfast in one of the restaurants in our hotel. It was delicious! We purchased tickets in advance for the Neon Museum,.Founded in 1996, the Neon Museum is a non-profit organization dedicated to collecting, preserving, studying and exhibiting iconic Las Vegas signs for educational, historic, arts and…
San Diego To Las Vegas
For the week before NYE we decided to take a short trip to Las Vegas, which is about 5.5 hours away from San Diego. We are not the party animals we used to never be, or even like gambling. This trip objective was to explore what Las Vegas has to offer besides the typical activities…
Sarah & Wine – Willamette Valley Edition
Sarah was really patient with me when I decided to visit almost all the national parks in Oregon, in exchange I insisted on treating her to get to spend the last day in the wine region. We were flying that night, but we had all day to drink wine! We drove towards the Valley and…
Oregon Coast
After visiting Mt. Hood we drove straight to the Oregon coast. Our hotel was in the small town of Seaside that we were going to visit the next morning, We were lucky to be driving through Astoria when the sunset was happening (and Sarah needed to pee), so we stopped for some time to walk…
May 18, 1980
On May 18, 1980 at 8:32 a.m., a magnitude 5.1 earthquake triggered one of the world’s largest recorded landslides, followed by one of the most powerful volcanic blasts in the history of North America: Mount St. Helens. That morning, twenty-three square miles of the mountain blasted sideways at 650 m.p.h. The temperature reached 660 degrees…
Mt. Hood & Columbia River Gorge
In our third day in the beautiful state of Oregon, we woke up really to rent a car for the next three days. After some research, Eitan noticed that renting a car 15 minutes away from the city center was $150 cheaper than renting it at the airport. We took an Uber to pick up…
Portland Neighborhoods
We started this beautiful day by walking to Hawthorne Blvd which is the hipster area full of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars. This was the first time I took my new DSLR camera out, so bear with me as I am still learning how to use it. The houses around this area look cute like…
Portlandia
For Labor Day weekend, we took a short vacation to Oregon. Sarah has been here when she was little, so she didn’t really remember much. Eitan has never been, and with cheap flight tickets, this was the best destination to go. We flew to Portland early in the morning and the view of Mt Hood…
Obrigado Portugal and to our World Adventure!
On the way to Lisbon we stopped at the magnificent Almendres Cromlech, a megalithic complexhe largest existing group of structured menhirs in the Iberian Peninsula (and one of the largest in Europe), this archaeological site consists of several megalithic structures: cromlechs and menhir stones, that belong to the so-called “megalithic universe of Évora” These are…
Roman Evora
The young couple slept in the back, missing several scenic towns topped by castles, and arrived at our hotel in Evora at 6:00, which was right within the old town. This was a beautiful hotel, where we were greeted by a perfect English-speaking young woman, who sat us down on a couch and brought us…
Castelo De Vide
We met in the lobby where Sarah got teary as the reality hit that, of their 180-day trip, there were just two left. We departed before 9:30, stopping at a spot on the river with a view of Porto’s iron bridge where Sarah and Eitan shot one of their dancing videos. We continued on for…
Guimaraes
We headed to Guimaraes, a short drive away. It is regarded as the birth place of Portugal and this extensive history is reflected in the variety of national monuments and historic buildings found within the city. Largo Hill is to the north of the city and this area contains the most important historical monuments of Guimarães….
Bragging in Braga
We piled into the car after 9:00 and headed to Braga, the third largest city in Portugal with a very attractive old town, where we had an excellent breakfast and then walked around and soaked it in. We headed towards the city center, where the main sights were located. Braga’s upscale old center is packed…
Port Wine Tasting
After that sardines lunch, we were ready for the second part of our Porto day! We walked with an Australian couple who had taken the tour to the meeting place for the 3:00 winery tour about port wine production that was to include lots of tasting. At the meeting place, we were greeted by a…
Free Tour: Porto Edition
After a good night at our hotel in Porto, we started our sightseeing day at a nice breakfast place the guidebook recommended. Then on to a free tour of Porto!! This was a major event in the lives of Elly and Dan. They have tended to avoid tours, preferring to walk and explore on their own….
700 Year Old University
We then headed off to Coimbra, which was something more than 1½ hours away, another easy drive with ¾ of our party sleeping. Unfortunately, once the GPS got us to the “town center” of Coimbra, the place was totally nondescript with no indication where the cute part might be. Eventually, we drove to the university,…
Medieval Obidos
After the hotel’s excellent breakfast, at 8:45am, we left and headed for Obidos. As much as Eitan tried to find fault with Dan’s excellent stick-shift driving, he had no problem sleeping for long periods with Dan at the wheel, as did Eitan’s wife and mother-in-law. But, once we arrived at the parking lot, Dan failed…
Fairytale Sintra
After our strange and curious day in Lisbon during which Sarah & Eitan and Elly & Dan did their own things, we rejoined forces to go to Sintra, a fairy-tale town just 20 miles outside of Lisbon. Unfortunately, fairy-tale towns don’t have a lot of fairy-tale parking, so we struggled to find a lot, finally…
The Tower Of Belem
While we were separated from Elly and Dan for the day, we decided we needed to explore Belem, on of the “Freguesias” (civil parish) of Lisbon. Originally we wanted to take the historical tram to get there, but the insane quantity of tourists and the long wait between trams forced us to take the normal bus to…
Lisbon: The City Of Fado
After a short flight from Casablanca, Morocco to Lisbon, Portugal where Sarah got lucky enough to get all the rows for herself, we finally arrived back in the old continent. After renting a car which took around 3 hours ( for some reason everyone was renting a car!), we headed to our beautiful hotel in the…
Shukran Morocco!
In the morning we were met by a nice lady guide for a tour of Marrakesh. Koutoubia Mosque, or Mosque of the Booksellers, was begun under the Berber dynasty of the Almoravids in 1120, but was substantially rebuilt from 1162 Almohad caliph under Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur, and became one of the most characteristic…
Marrakesh
It is the fourth largest city in the country, after Casablanca, Fez and Tangier. But is possibly the most important of Morocco’s four former imperial cities (cities that were built by Moroccan Berber empires). Marrakesh has some similarities to Fez in its age and sites, but there is one big difference: Motorcycles. Whereas, in Fez, the…
Morrocan Coast: Essaouira
In Morocco in July, it is possible to escape the heat by heading to the coast, and so we went to Essaouira for one of our more laid-back days to explore an exotic walled town that, relative to our other stops, had fewer must-see sights. This gave Eitan something of a break from his relentless…
African Hollywood
Back on the road again, with Sarah and Eitan providing scintillating company. We made a stop at the particularly photogenic Kasbah Taourirt. The el Glaoui clan controlled one of the major southern caravan routes to West Africa and were given extensive power by the French during colonial rule in exchange for keeping the southern tribes subdued….
Desert Fox
Dan was awake at 5:45 and had the pleasure of waking up Eitan at 6:15. Eitan is not a morning person, but he couldn’t resist taking a quick look at the sunrise. Captain Fomo was very close to almost being alive as they trudged up the dunes to experience sunrise in the Sahara. Dan was…
The Sahara
Morocco is full of surprises. From Fez, we drove up into the mountains and through a town that looked as if it could be in the Alps, and then on to a forest filled with monkeys in the Ifrane National Park. Barbary Macaques are endangered monkeys found in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Due to deforestation of their…
FEZtival of Colors
Fez’s medina is an overwhelming assault on the senses. Around every corner, there is something new to intrigue the visitor … except that the “something new” is usually something very old, in that it’s being done as it’s been done for centuries. So, join us for a pictorial reenactment of our Fez exploration. This guy…
The Jews Of Fez
We finally arrived in Fez in the early evening. There are no motorized vehicles in Fez’s enormous old city, aka Medina, so our luggage was taken in a push-cart to our hotel, aka Riad. In Morocco, a Riad is usually a centuries-old large home converted to an intimate hotel. Like all such old homes, it…
On The Road To Fez!
After touring the Hassan II Mosque, we boarded our van for the true Morocco Adventure. The fact is that, regardless of the famous movie of the same name, Casablanca is one of the less interesting places to see in this country, so we quickly headed out to explore a country that Sarah and Eitan soon…
The Moroccan White House
Sarah and Eitan arrived to Casablanca a day earlier. The hotel for the night was by far the best hotel of the whole trip, very luxurious like nothing we stayed before. Perfect for a change in pace, especially after the terrible night sleep we had in Italy the night before. Casablanca does not offer…
La Serenissima
We took a short train from Trieste to Mestre and walked to our hostel for the night. We decided to stay in Mestre as the hotels in Venice are ridiculously expensive. We both have been to Venice and we were super tired, and almost stayed back at the hostel to relax. But luckily we chose…
Bonjourno Italia
We took a bus from Piran to Trieste, it was pretty hard to find the bus we had to take and not much information was available regarding buses to Italy. Still we managed to get into the correct one and after 2 hours we were in Italy. This stop was purely strategic as we needed…
WHERE IS NOODLE 