Welcome to our blog! We document our adventures in travel, food, and family. Hope you have a nice stay!
All in Travel
A baby’s first hike is a big experience! You’ll want to consider the following to make sure baby’s first hiking experience is enjoyable for both parent and child: nap timing, equipment, trail length, terrain, elevation gain and flexibility!
Lake Geneva has always felt like an extension of Chicago even though it’s another state away due to it only being about an hour and a half drive. I have fond memories of going there as a child, stopping at the Brat Stop on the way up, taking boat rides on the lake, checking out the local ice cream shops and dining on cheese curds! 30 something years later I’m excited to share a taste of lake life with my daughter for the first time!
LA and Palm Springs are two cities that you should spend a lot more time than just five days, but sometimes that’s all you have! I’m here to tell you that even though may not see and do everything on your list, you can still fit in a whole lot. Jeremy and I are lucky that we have family in both locations, so we have fantastic tour guides in California. We were lucky that our family tailored our visit to both of our favorite things: eating and spending time outdoors. Here were the highlights from our visit and the perfect five-day itinerary!
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now and now that it’s summer weather (most days) in Chicago it’s finally the perfect time to share some of my favorite Chicago summer activities. Some suggestions are tried and true, but I’d like to think that at least a few are ideas that might not appear in a typical google search. Mix and match your favorites for the perfect Chicago summer weekend!
Those first few moments you find out a family member or a close friend have passed away are initially shocking and then filled with grief. This morning when Jeremy broke the news to me of Anthony Bourdain's passing he delivered it in a way that you would have thought a good friend had died, and one had. Anthony Bourdain is/was the biggest travel influence in our lives and the person that pushed us to follow our dreams.
On our seventh (Jeremy) and third (Stephanie) trip to the Crescent City, so we made a concerted effort to make it off Bourbon Street and out of the French Quarter to explore some of New Orleans’ other unique neighborhoods and try some new restaurants. Of course, we couldn’t neglect all of our old favorites! Below are some of our suggestions for enjoying a long weekend in NOLA that hits up five different New Orleans neighborhoods.
Last summer we made a vow to get out of the city more and spend more time in nature. Even though the Midwest doesn’t have the scenery of a Colorado or an Oregon, there are still plenty of places to camp near Chicago that will help you reconnect with nature. There are great locations in Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and even Illinois that are a two-hour drive or less and have great trails and campsites for a night or two away.
I’ll begin by saying it was VERY hard to narrow down this list as almost every restaurant we ate at in Spain had its own merits. But, these 15 restaurants pulled away from the pack and were some of our favorite spots in Barcelona, Madrid and San Sebastian.
San Sebastian was the last stop on our Spain itinerary and likely the one that I’ll wax poetic about for years to come as it combined two of my favorite things: the outdoors and food. We visited in their off-season, which meant some restaurants were closed and it was a bit too chilly to want to hang out by the beach and ocean. What could have been a downer was actually really nice as we had both hiking paths and spots at pinxto bars available for us whenever we wanted.
By the time our train pulled into Madrid we’d hit our Spanish stride and were starting to feel like travelers again and less like tourists. The majority of time spent in Madrid was picking different neighborhoods to walk around and explore, with a few sites sprinkled in here and there.
Follow the itinerary below for a perfect five days in Barcelona! If you want to mix it, try and pick and choose 2 touristy things per day and mix it in with lots of plaza people watching, eating and drinking! With 5 days in Barcelona I’d say we did a pretty good job of packing in a good variety of activities, food, museums, and neighborhoods. There is certainly some wiggle-room in our itinerary to add more activities, make it more relaxed, whatever is your vision of a dream vacation!
This year Jeremy and I decided to choose tapas over turkey and booked a two-week trip to Spain over Thanksgiving! It seemed like the perfect time given that we had two extra days off work for the holiday and it would be after tourist season in Spain making everything a little bit less crowded and more affordable. We also had some fantastic fall weather while we were there as it was in the high 50s and low 60s most of our trip. We chose to visit three different cities during our time in Spain: Barcelona, Madrid and San Sebastian.
