If you read our extensive ramblings (see what I did there?) about getting to Portugal, you know that we were given generous and extensive support from many strangers on social…

This post was originally going to be about last week’s trip to the Azores Islands, specifically, São Miguel, the largest and most populated island. The weather is always milder in…

tl; dr:/ Moves are hard, intracity or interstate. Moving internationally is the hardest of all. When we decided to move to Portugal, we thought we would just sell everything, get…

For purists, the VSOE is not the “original” Orient Express which was a route, not a specific set of carriages. The first “Express d’Orient” left Paris enroute to Vienna on June…

This is primarily a post of pictures, because right after Lisa got sick with the ‘flu, so did John. We both spent the days in our room, which fortunately had…

There we are, all dressed up and ready to enjoy a meal created by Michelin-star chef, Jean Imbert. Imbert is new to Belmond, having joined them at the start of…

Imagine for a moment that you are stepping off a bus into an ordinary car park. Then, as you walk between a couple of delivery vans you see it: the…

The original subtitle for this series was “Trip Of a Lifetime” ( or “TOAL”) and, just to cut to the chase, that is an exact description of the journey from…

While our Southern France posts were going live, someone asked me how we managed to go for such a long trip with only a suitcase and backpack. With the caveat…

Since we’re between trips at the moment, let’s turn the Wayback Machine towards the fall of 2021. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised that when we started to get…