As beautiful as Cartagena is, the heat does start to get to you and retreating to the beach felt like a natural solution. We arranged two day trips by boat – Blue Apple Beach and Isla Barú. We were able to book Blue Apple Beach ourselves online and our hotel Casa Gastelbondo arranged the day […]
Read more "Isla Barú & Blue Apple Beach, Colombia"Where to begin with this amazing city?? The food, the architecture, the bright colors, the heat, the bougainvillea (best I’ve ever seen!!) Cartagena is STUNNING and way more cosmopolitan than I was expecting. I was completely blown away by how much I enjoyed our time here. On our first day, we arrived early afternoon after […]
Read more "Cartagena!"The entire reason we chose to visit Santa Marta was due to its proximity to Tayrona National Park, a protected area covering the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where they meet the Caribbean coast. Known for its rich biodiversity, Tayrona includes mountains, beaches, and jungles all in one park – not to […]
Read more "Tayrona National Park – Fails and Wins"Minca was meant to be a footnote in our travels to Colombia. I’d read a few nice things about it being a cute but tiny backpacker destination in the mountains near Santa Marta. It ended up being a highlight of our trip and we enjoyed it so much we went back for a second day. […]
Read more "Colombia Part 3: Minca in the mountains"After a couple of nights “roughing” it in a hostel, I’d booked us 4 nights at Hotel Boutique Don Pepe in downtown Santa Marta. (pro tip: the week night rates were significantly cheaper than the weekend rates) The hotel was incredibly romantic and featured only 12 rooms, each named after a family member of Don […]
Read more "Colombia Part 2: Santa Marta"After taking an entire year off traveling 😱, Ryan and I were ready for some adventure. Usually this means a surf trip somewhere tropical- in fact we were about to pull the trigger on some plane tickets to Ecuador right before a heavy dose of life intervened. Unfortunately Ryan’s shoulders were not quite recovered enough for […]
Read more "Seeking Adventure in Colombia – Part 1: Rodadero"I haven’t written in more than a year because I wasn’t sure where to start. Last December, on his 35th birthday, my superman husband Ryan woke in the night with a pain radiating from his shoulders down his arms that took his breath away. The pain was so sudden and severe that we visited the […]
Read more "When Healthy People Get Sick"This was our second visit to Rome – the only city we duplicated on this trip from our honeymoon five years ago (which included Venice, Florence and Rome). We arrived late afternoon, checked into this incredible AirBNB in Trastevere (the pics don’t do it justice), and set out for dinner. Since we’d already seen much of […]
Read more "Ciao Roma!"While staying in Levanto, we spent an afternoon exploring Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare, two of the five villages that comprise Cinque Terre. While typically packed with tourists, we purposefully went later in the evening to avoid the crowds, and subsequently got to enjoy a stunning sunset and dinner in Monterosso. At our first stop, […]
Read more "Cinque Terre – Vernazza & Monterosso al Mare"Whilst scrolling through Instagram (as one does), I happened upon a photo of a beautiful beach dotted with colorful umbrellas and filled with surfers with a geo-tag of Levanto, Italy. I had no idea there was surf anywhere in Italy! Intrigued, I did some research and found that Levanto is the doorway to the Cinque […]
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