On the drive home from Thanksgiving, Erin and I decided to stretch our legs with a short hike in Crowders Mountain State Park in North Carolina. We’d heard from a friend that it was easy to access, not too difficult, and the views were nice. Upon arriving, we grabbed a trail map at the visitor…
You might have read that after leaving France, we decided to move back to Richmond. As our most recent home in the US, and the place where many of our US-based friends live, it was a pretty easy choice (you know what’s not easy – missing Freiburg a lot). After spending time in Florida with Erin’s…
Most people don’t realize just how close the 5 towns of Cinque Terre are to each other, but there’s only 12 kilometers between the first and the last. In fact, if all 4 coastal walking/hiking paths are open, the entire route can be hiked in about 5 hours. When I first heard of Cinque Terre,…
It’s been a long time between posts on the blog – sorry about that! We’ll hopefully have more about our transition back to the US soon, but for now, there’s a backlog of written, but not posted, items from our time in Nice. Here’s the first! — As I mentioned in a post about day…
30 days in Nice leaves time for a lot of day trips. Situated right in the middle of the French Riviera, Nice is the perfect jumping off point for short trips to multiple coastal towns. Here are some of my favorite to Nice’s east. Eze Eze is actually two towns; Eze sur mer, which is…
Brian and I got back a few days ago from a 3-day trip to Cinque Terre on the western coast of Italy, and it exceeded every. single. one. of my expectations (which were already too high, IMO, especially for a place I’d never been before). We stayed at a hostel in Riomaggiore, which is the…
I was going to call this “Nice: First Impressions,” and then I thought, well, are they really first impressions after 2 weeks? Procrastination at its finest! Anyway, here are some of my random thoughts (with pictures, of course) about Nice and the surrounding areas. Hello, gorgeous! There’s pretty much nothing more beautiful than a sparkling,…
My quest to try all of Freiburg’s ice cream flavors has continued, and now even includes Belize, so I figured it was time for an update. When we last left off, I had determined that mint just doesn’t taste as good around Germany as it does back home, so I’ve left it alone. There have been,…
Just to the east of Nice, there is a pair of towns called Eze. Eze Sur Mer is located right on the sea, as its name suggests, and Eze Village is set high in the hills, about 450 meters above sea level. The two are linked by the Nietzsche Path, so named because of a…
For my birthday this spring, Erin bought two gift certificates to go paragliding just outside of Freiburg. To comprehend the enormity of the fact that she bought two, you have to understand – Erin is very afraid of heights. Like, legs hurt when near the edge of a balcony afraid. But she loves me enough to…
The Wildly Ordinary Life 