I am happy to report that Batumi was an anomaly – the rest of Georgia is wonderful and quite the adventure when self-driving. I won’t go into the specifics of Georgian driving habits again, you can find those in our previous post, but will share the rental agent’s reaction when we returned the car. Speed…
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For 29 days we navigated our way across roughly 2000 kilometers / 1242 miles of Georgian roadways. We will have a full report next week, but for now here’s a taste of what it’s like to drive in this former Soviet republic. We rented a car through LocalRent, an aggregator working with small companies that…
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The Eastern European country of Georgia may not be on your radar – it certainly wasn’t on ours – but it frequently pops up as an “undiscovered gem.” Since we were revisiting Istanbul this year it worked well to hop over to this country bordering the Black Sea, and determine for ourselves whether that idiom…
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Since we began our nomadic travels three years ago we’ve visited 132 cities, but until now have not re-visited any of them; Istanbul is the first. It was our third stop less than a month into our trial run in 2021, and at the time, while it was certainly interesting, it did not capture our…
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Of the 27 countries that constitute the European Union, there are only a handful we haven’t visited. Poland was one of them, and we can now check it off as the 57th country in which we’ve set foot. While a diverse group of ethnic tribes moved through what would become modern-day Poland (Germanic, Celts, Balts,…
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We initially thought we’d fly straight from the Netherlands to Warsaw, Poland. Instead, we opted for a more leisurely overland route. We did three short bus hops and one train ride (each about four hours in length) spending a couple of nights in four of Germany’s smaller cities, namely Duisburg, Hannover, Leipzig, and Dresden, before…
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Following our cruise to the British Isles & Iceland we’ve begun making our way across Europe with our sights set on landing in Georgia at the end of July. Our first stop was Brielle, about 100 kilometers / 60 miles southwest of Amsterdam in the province of South Holland, where we connected with my step-sister…
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For us, cruising has always been about the ports of call rather than the activities or entertainment onboard the ship. We both agreed this 15-day sailing with seven ports, two of which (in Iceland) were extended stops of more than 24 hours, tops our list of cruise itineraries. We boarded the Royal Caribbean Jewel in…
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En route from Vienna to Amsterdam, we stopped for a few days in the central European country of Czechia, or as it is better known in English, the Czech Republic. However, well before either of those names became part of our lexicon, it was known as Bohemia. The Duchy of Bohemia was founded in the…
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We always look forward to wandering the historic streets of European cities. Vienna was no exception and it was pleasant to visit in Spring before the hordes of Summer tourists. On the far-flung edges of the Roman Empire, the Danubian Limes marked the border between civilization and the barbaric Germanic tribes. Water alone wasn’t sufficient…
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