Viva la Venezia!

Laura and I have been in Italy for exactly one month today, so we’re long overdue for an update. We have a legitimate excuse: we’ve spent the last three weeks on the Maestrelli/Frazier “bullet train” of family tourism – one week with Laura’s parents, sister, and uncle in Tuscany; then a week on the Amalfi coast with my parents added to the mix; then a final week with just my parents in Sicily – and we were on the go pretty much non-stop. Our Moms did an incredible job planning our time together, and I swear my Mom would make an amazing tour guide… you would get your money’s worth of site-seeing, that’s for sure! :) Laura and I found ourselves quoting National Lampoon’s European Vacation more than once during those three weeks, with an Italian flare, of course: “Look kids! Pompei! The Duomo!”. We’ll have a lot more to share about our travels with our families in a future blog post (and they may chime in with a guest blog entry or two, ahem).

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UK Photos & Pano-palooza #2

Hi all! Laura and I are recovering from three weeks of traveling with our families in Italy (just kidding, fams… we had a wonderful time and miss you already!), and we’re hard at work getting our blog and photo albums up-to-date. We finally have ALL of our United Kingdom photos uploaded and captioned (because we know each and every one of you goes through every single photo slideshow we post on the blog… hah!). :)

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Bye Bye Britain

Before our UK road trip gets too far behind us, we wanted to wrap up with some final thoughts about our adventures in Scotland. Our Isle of Skye album is up, as are all of the rest of our UK albums on our UK photo gallery page.

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Down to the Wire on the Fringe

Sometimes I wonder if my anal-retentive, slightly OCD, plan-focused, like-to-have-things-just-so tendencies, paired with Laura’s Italian “assertiveness” (let’s call it that) and her strong aversion to being made to feel like a sucker (she would make a pretty convincing Israeli :), might be a dangerous combination. The percentage of times that Laura and I have slept in the first room offered to us in hotels around the world is embarrassingly – or impressively – low. We’re never too proud to request an upgrade or ask for a different room if the one they’ve given us doesn’t meet our (admittedly unrealistic) standards. Sometimes, though, our determination to make things happen works out for the best, and the universe rewards us. At least, that’s how we like to look at it.

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Our Biggest (Little) Fan

Ellie Messick, we love you and your giant chubbiness! Thanks for reading, little lady. :)

 

Pano-palooza!

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I thought it might be fun to share some of the panoramic photographs I’ve stitched together over the last seven months. Adobe Photoshop’s Photomerge feature makes this incredibly easy; it hurts my brain thinking about how they automatically match up the photos, align and skew them to fit together, do color correction and white balancing, and all that fancy stuff. However they do it, some of resulting photos are pretty cool. Enjoy!

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Fringe Benefits

We’re wrapping up our month-long UK adventure here in Edinburgh, a city whose name I continued to mispronounce well into my twenties. We’ve spent most of the last three days here immersed in the sensory overload that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, an arts/comedy/theater/freak show/music festival that takes place every year over the course of four weeks in August, and includes roughly TWO THOUSAND different acts scattered around the city. Think: urban Burning Man… with haggis.

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I… Had a Meltdown… in Africa

When I first started writing this post, my plan was to unload for a while about the difficulties we had with lodging, service, and general infrastructure after our Kilimanjaro climb in Tanzania, and about how I basically had a minor meltdown as a result. Those of you who know our good friend and travel partner Christi may have already heard a bit from her about my travel weariness (or more specifically, my lack of patience with the developing world), and I still hate thinking that my inability to deal with some of the primitive infrastructure in Tanzania had a negative impact on her experience of seeing Africa for the first time. I was going to write about all that, and how I’ve gained more perspective on the experience now, and all the meaningful things I’ve learned about myself, blah, blah, blah.

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It's the Cheese, Gromit!

Greetings from Scotland! In light of the fact that we’ve been wandering around the United Kingdom for last three weeks, we thought it might be time to do a proper update about our adventures here. Dustin is working on a short post about our week in London, so I’m going to focus on the road trip we’ve been on for the last couple of weeks.

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Behold, the Ferret Derby

Let’s say you’re on a month-long road trip around the United Kingdom and you find yourself in a small, unpronounceable town in Wales. And let’s say that while you’re wandering around this vowel-deprived town, you stumble across this poster on the side of the road…

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