Greetings
Greetings from Spain! It’s now been six months since we drove away from our home in Michigan and began this crazy adventure. We can’t believe it’s already been a half year! So we wanted to provide you all with a quick trip update. It’s been a hell of a ride and we’re still having a blast.
Thank You
But before we start with the update, we just wanted to say “Thank you” to those of you who have been following our tiny little travel blog and cheering us on from the sidelines. Thank you. Your thoughtful emails, your travel recommendations, your generous offers for places to rest our heads, and and simply “likes” are so very encouraging which energizes us to keep on traveling and continuing this blog. Thank you. We really enjoy hearing from you and your support means the world to us. So, again, thank you.
Brief Recap of Past 2-Months of Travel
Map of Route for Month 5 & 6
We last updated gave an update from Cartagena, Colombia. Since then, we caught a flight to Florida where we spent a very rushed three days visiting friends and family before boarding the Celebrity Eclipse to cross the Atlantic. This fantastic cruise took us to Nassau, Bermuda, and the Azores (Portugal) over 14 days before docking in Southampton, England which is where both the Mayflower and Titanic departed from to begin their fateful Atlantic crossings.
We spent a few lovely days taking in the tourist sites of London before hopping on a flight over to Marrakech, Morocco. We roamed around this beautiful country exploring its mountains, deserts, beaches, forests, and cities for an entire month. We celebrated our wedding anniversary by riding camels into the Sahara Desert near the Algerian border. And although we got caught in the middle of a freak sandstorm, that trek was a highlight for us and we’re looking forward to posting about our experiences in this country of contrasts. Stay tuned!
From Morocco, we crossed the Mediterranean by ferry and arrived to Malaga, Spain, which was a refreshing change of pace. After a bus ride to Granada, we ate tons of tapas and visited the city’s renowned Alhambra, which was the 18th UNESCO World Heritage Site of our journey. A train then took us back to the coast where we reconnected with some location-independent friends we’d met on the cruise who’ve been graciously hosting us for a few days as we explored the gorgious beaches of Cabo de Gata National Park together.
We’re now on a seven-hour bus ride for a fast and furious few days in Madrid where we hope to take in a concert (Bad Religion is playing, woohoo!), watch Spain defeat Chile in their second match of the World Cup (if Spain doesn’t win, fear for our lives), and attend the new King’s coronation on Thursday (King Juan Carlos is abdicating the throne to son Filipe, making him the youngest monarch in Europe).
Update About Our Website
Below are some posts we’re hoping to write in the upcoming weeks. Honestly, we’ll probably never get around to drafting all of these but hope to at least get out a good majority of them. We never imagined how time consuming this blogging stuff would be!
We’ve usually been writing lots of post about our adventures, which we plan to continue. But we also want to begin incorporating more helpful articles too. Google Analytics consistently tells us that our seemingly boring post on “How to Beat the Mexican Exit Tax Scam” is actually our most viewed article. So that apparently seems to be resonating and helping some folks. We’d love to continue to doll out useful advice and more general travel tips that you can use.
Central America
- Our Best of Central America Guide
- Is Central America Safe?
- 3 Budget-Friendly Weeklong Itineraries YOU Can Take in Central America
- Guatemala
- Belize
- Mexico
Cruise
- A Guide to Repositioning Cruises for the Long-Term Traveler (with Interviews of other Travel Bloggers)
Adventures
- Hiking Around Morocco’s Atlas Mountains
- Sandboarding Across the Sahara Dessert
- Morocco Trip Summary
Drinking
- Beers Around Costa Rica
- Beers Around Panama
- Beers Around Colombia
- Drinking Around the Celebrity Eclipse
- A Craft Beer Explosion in London
- (Not) Drinking Beer in Morocco
General & Travel Tips
- A (long overdue) update to our FAQs page
- How We Afford a Lifestyle of World Travel (and how you can too!)
- Our Travel Gear Pack List & Recommendations
- Our Travel Site Recommendations
Where in the World Are We Going from Here?
After a few days of city life in Madrid, we’re headed to the northwest corner of Spain to Santiago de Componstela to explore the country’s Galicia region. We plan to take about a week to make our way across the Northern Atlantic coastline through small fishing villages and lush National Parks through the Cantabrias and Austrias regions. Then we’ll be basing ourselves in San Sebastian for a few days to explore the food and wine of the Basque country and may even attend Haro’s famous Wine Fight.
This brings us to July and our plan is to move on to France. We don’t have much planned out from here but we’d love to take a multiday bike tour of the countryside and wine regions. (If anyone knows if this even exists, emails us!) What visit to France is complete without a trip to the City of Lights, so of course we’ll stop in Paris for at least a few days.
No later than mid-July we should be in Belgium where we are thinking about just staying put somewhere for a week or two. When you’re constantly moving from place to place every couple of days for the past half of year, it becomes very desirable to just slow down. We loved a previous visit to Belgium for its quaint towns and its incredible beer, so it may be just the place to recharge our batteries.
By August we’ll be moving on to Germany and likely to the Czech Republic. From there our already rough plans become even fuzzier but we’d love to spend a good amount of time exploring some of the less-visited countries in Eastern Europe and eventually start heading south. We’ll see. Anything after that is a huge “question mark” so your guess is probably as good as ours. There’s just so many places we want to try to visit. Throw a dart on a map and give us a suggestion.
So stay tuned and see if we actually follow any of those always evolving travel plans and where we may wind up next. We’re very excited for our summer in Europe and experiencing a different pace of travel than our past six months largely in Central America and Morocco. Thanks again for reading and following along this journey.
–John & Heather
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