Sleeping in the same bed for more than five nights hasn’t happened to us in quite some time. It was nice not to be constantly moving, but after a week of relaxing with family it was time to get out of the house and do something interesting again. Although we are sort of back home, we still have plenty of free time and might as well take advantage of all of our vacation time.
This trip takes us back to the desert, two different ones actually. We visited Joshua Tree National …

Another visitor arrives! Lori, our fourth, and probably final visitor, met us in Madrid and we spent a few short days in Spain and Gibraltar. Even though we were only in the country for about three days, we did our best to see a few things as we passed through and still had time for tapas and three pitchers of sangria.
In Madrid, we walked around the city center area. Puerto del Sol, the Grand Via, Plaza Mayor, and the royal palace were all great to see. The royal palace was …

After spending a week in two big, modern cities, we went to see some of the history of Japan. To do that, we went to another huge city, but this one was different. Kyoto is one of the only major cities to have been spared massive damage during the war; it was also the capital of Japan for about a thousand years. This means the city has an enormous number of old, in tact, and very impressive buildings. The amount of temples and shrines is overwhelming.
Speaking of very old …

Almost 30 years after Heather’s dad visited the Philippines, we ended up staying with the same lovely Puray family in Davao City. We welcomed the change of pace, having real local guidance and an entire house complete with all of it’s amenities.
One of the most interesting things to us was the various different forms of transport. On our first full day out, we rode in four different kinds of vehicles. First, a motorcycle with an attached frame big enough to squeeze in 10 people, plus the driver and usually …

While it’s easy to spend a lot of time drinking beer on the beach, there are other places to see. The next stop was the mountains. We found a nice hotel with a view of some rice fields at the base of a couple volcanoes. It was nice and quiet, sometimes depressingly empty. A couple bus loads of old people showed up one night, but were gone the next day. They were on some sort of organized tour, and judging from the extremely sunburned beer bellies, they probably had spent …

Bali wasn’t on our original list of stops on the tour, this is one the travel agent talked us into. We did a little more research than usual and bought a Lonely Planet Encounter guide. We’d never seen these little guys and figured we give it a try to see if we liked the abbreviated version. From the book, we picked out the little island of Nusa Lembongan and the mountainous region next to the dormant volcano as our main destinations.
Nusa Lembongan is a short ferry ride away, but still …

Heat, sun, sand, and fish all welcomed us to Queensland. Apparently we haven’t spent enough time at the beach, so here we go again. We’ll head north again in three weeks.
The first stop was Cairns. There certainly was a bigger celebration in Sydney, but we experienced ANZAC Day up north instead. It is the Aussie version of Memorial Day, and celebrated in much the same way. We got a head start on the occasion by eating a whole bag of ANZAC biscuits (a delicious oatmeal and coconut cookie) a few …

The main destination in New South Wales was Sydney, but the first stop was the Blue Mountains.

Feeling that the name was a bit familiar, we looked into it and found out there are at least ten mountain ranges in the world known as the Blue Mountains. This one was probably unique in that it had a city named Katoomba, which is where we spent the night. The town was quite pleasant, we even found several places serving high tea with all the traditional items. We were mostly there to see …

At least that’s what the license plates say in the state of Victoria. We officially set foot on our 4th continent since January by landing in Melbourne and we hit the road yet again. The three of us didn’t have the same flight so Beth had a little extra time in Melbourne to check out the shopping center. She found Woolworth’s and Target!
We headed for the Great Ocean Road and Apollo Bay. The first day was spent mostly in the twilight and dark which made driving the unfamiliar twisty …

After the ferry ride from Wellington to Picton, we made our way towards the west coast of New Zealand. The first night we made it through wine country and stopped for a pint and glass of wine at the Cork and Keg and continued on to St. Arnaud before we parked the Hippie Camper for the evening. The next day was a long haul to the glacier area. We stopped throughout the day to see the sights like Pancake Rocks, and a brewery. We also had a seaside picnic lunch. …