On our last full day in Bermuda we planned a catamaran trip around the island with snorkeling. We had to travel to the other end of the island to the Royal Naval Dockyard. During the high season you can take a ferry from St. George but that ended on 11/1, so our options were the bus or a taxi. We ended up taking the bus which took us about 1.5 hours to get from our end to the other. It gave us a very good feel for the island though. It is a very clean place. All the homes are well kept and there didn’t appear to be any slummy areas. We also noticed how friendly everyone was! Almost everyone wh ..read more

The capital city of Bermuda is Hamilton. It definitely feels more like a big city than St. George, but is still pretty small. There are no fast food restaurants or even a Starbucks. It took about a half hour to get to Hamilton from St. George by bus. We came upon a church almost immediately so of course had to go inside. It ended up being The Cathedral of the Most Holy Trinity, or most often just referred to as the Bermuda Cathedral. The original church was started in 1844 but was destroyed by arson in 1884. The current building was constructed in 1885. While it was being built, a hurricane ca ..read more

If you are a reader of my blog, you will know that a series of unfortunate events prevented us from doing our Global Entry interviews in June. Since you only have six months to complete the interview without starting the process over and paying again, we decided we should leave the country again so that we could come back in and complete the interview. We decided the kids’ long weekend in November was a good time and were pretty open to location. I was initially trying to do Portugal but we decided we wouldn’t have as much time as we wanted and would be exhausted when we got back. I decided to ..read more

Since we were unsure of plans once Zach and the students left when we booked our tickets, we just made roundtrip reservations in and out of Dublin. This made things easier in some ways but also meant we needed to return to Dublin before going home. I didn’t want to risk something going wrong the morning on so we decided to fly back the day before. Playground in Dublin our last day there We didn’t do much on our last day in Dublin because we were all pretty tired and it was rainy. Also, as we were leaving the airport AC realized that she left her belt bag containing her phone, AirPods, wallet w ..read more

I am often asked what my favorite city is to visit. It is really hard to pick one so I usually just say I have a top five. Prague has always been in my top five but I realized this trip that it is probably my #1. I love everything about Prague. It is just so beautiful! It definitely helps that it was not bombed during WWII so it is one of the few major European cities with its original buildings. I hadn’t been back since June 2018, when I brought students here on a study abroad. The summer before that (2017), the big kids and I lived in Prague for two months while I did research for my book. T ..read more

About five years ago I realized that I only had two countries left to visit out of the 27 countries in the EU. My plan had been to visit all 27 before I was 40, but then Covid happened followed by a baby, so my plans were delayed. In a stroke of fate, I got to finally check Cyprus (#26) off the list! My Hungarian friend Réka is married to a Cypriot. They were originally supposed to be in Budapest while we were in Europe so we planned to visit them there. As luck would have it, a couple of months before we headed to Europe, Réka messaged me to say their plans had changed and they would actually ..read more

One of AC’s favorite places is Paris. She’s been obsessed with it as long as I can remember. It also happens to be one of my least favorite places. Fortunately for AC, the best/closest/cheapest place for us to fly to Cyprus was from Paris. The girls and I took a three-hour train ride from Amsterdam the same morning Zach and the students left. Since we were only going to have about a half a day in Paris and we’ve already seen most things there, I told AC that she could pick what we did. Arriving at Gare du Nord We started by visiting a shopping mall to get a few new things as almost all our clo ..read more

The last day of the study abroad we took a day trip to The Hague. While not the capital of The Netherlands, it is where most of its government is located, as well as several world organizations. Our main purpose was to visit the International Criminal Court. Backside of the Dutch parliament building The Hague itself has a pretty old town which we wandered but unfortunately also realized quickly that almost everything was closed. It was a Monday but I had not read about things being closed this day so we were very disappointed not to be able to go into most of the buildings. There was a prison ..read more

Amsterdam is one of those cities that I like okay. The different houses along the canals and scenery are very neat, but I don’t care so much for the party vibe of the city. Not surprisingly, I liked it a lot more the first couple of times I visited when I was in my 20s. We took the train from Brussels, which is about a 2.5 hour trip. After checking into our hotel we headed into central Amsterdam to do a walking tour of the city. While the guide showed us some cool things and told us some good information, he wasn’t quite as entertaining as the other two guides we had which made the tour a litt ..read more

This was my third trip to Bruges and I always love it there. All the buildings still retain their medieval charm and it is really just wonderful! We took the train from Brussels and E enjoyed looking at all the cows, horses, and sheep along the way. The Belgian countryside is very pretty. We we Our train was a little delayed so we had to race to make the tour I had scheduled. Our tour guide was originally from NJ and did a great job of telling us about the city in interesting ways that were understandable. We did a chocolate tasting at the beginning of the tour. While not as good as the choco ..read more