Author: Claudia

  • Celebrating Love in East Hampton

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    This fall has afforded me some great East Coast and Midwest travel (thanks, dysfunctional government, for those 16 days off!). My first fall trip was to East Hampton, Long Island, where a group of extremely fun gals and one lucky guy spent a long weekend in September celebrating the upcoming nuptials of one of my…

  • To Rome With Love

    Dreaming of Rome on this lovely evening… Its adorable piazzas Its secret bread rooms (this door was open so we peeked in; it was two doors down from our apartment building, and made our room smell like freshly baked loaves every day!) Ella’s Street Art   Murals everywhere Its street performers … And of course,…

  • Sardinia: Look No Further for Your Next Destination

    I had never spent much time thinking about that “other” Italian island until last year when I was looking for a destination in Italy that would have pretty beaches but other activities to keep my husband (a hiker, a climber, but not a beach bum), my mom (a beach bum and culture enthusiast), and myself…

  • Diving the World’s Second Largest Barrier Reef

    When sequestration hit this federal employee with a self-diagnosed travel bug, there was really no other logical thing to do than plan a furlough-cation on a budget. I’d been itching to dive, since it had been about a year since my last SCUBA adventure, and since Nick isn’t a diver, it made perfect sense to…

  • Palm Springs: Don Draper, Date Shakes, and Desert

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    Palm Springs, California. The place might make you think of Bob Hope surrounded by palm trees in a desert. Or you might think of white sand beaches– isn’t there a Palm Springs in Florida? (Yes, but I avoid Florida at all costs). It may seem like a curious destination for a group of 30 y.o.-ish…

  • From Floreana, With Love

    The world is a small place, and there’s one tradition in the Galapagos Islands that seeks to show visitors exactly that. In Post Office Bay on Floreana Island, one of the 18 islands that make up the Galapagos archipelago off the coast of mainland Ecuador, there is a barrel just inland from a beach where visitors…

  • On Traveling as an American

    Traveling as an American comes with a lot of baggage (pun 100% intended!); I often felt as though we were starting in the hole whenever we interacted with others just because of what’s printed on our birth certificates, and that we needed to dig ourselves out by being the most polite, friendly, and humble travelers…

  • Thanksgiving Then and Now

    A year ago, around Thanksgiving, we found ourselves in Zomba, Malawi, after a bit of a rough patch of travel through Mozambique and Malawi. It was one of the few times on the trip I found myself homesick; we were really, really far from home, in a country–hell, a continent–where we had no friends or family.…

  • Vienna and Amsterdam: The Final Days of Our Trip

    We finished up our trip with a few days in Vienna and a 15-hour layover in Amsterdam (why not? also, it was the cheapest connection). My mother’s side of the family is Austrian, and while the family is large and there are branches all over the country, we tend to spend most of our time…

  • Florence: Art and Tourists, In Equal Numbers

    Even though I’d been to  Florence numerous times myself, it just didn’t feel right to  take Nick to Italy and not stop in there, so off the birthplace of the Renaissance we went. I have mixed feelings on Florence: it’s so full of beautiful art and history, but with that comes  a mind-boggling number of…