In my last post, I talked about the trip up to the Bob Marley House in Nine Mile, Jamaica. Read that if you’d like to learn about the journey, or read on for my experience at the house itself… After waiting for really just a few minutes, our tour guide arrived. My only regret of the entire experience was that I never got a picture of “Captain Crazy” as he introduced himself. What can I say about the Captain… he…
Most people that go to Jamaica, tend to park themselves in their hotel and spend their time lounging on the beach or poolside. Jamaica, whether fairly or unfairly has a reputation for being a little dangerous. I was shocked the first time we went there, to find out it consistently ranks in the top five for homicide rates in the world. In fact, the US State Department has a level 3 travel (Reconsider Travel) advisory for the entire country, and…
So here I am sitting on the far pier of the Franklyn D Resort, for the second time in five years. This time Ariel, Jacob, and I are joined by the newest addition to our little traveling party. Just like when we came here with Jacob when he was four months old, we always planned to come back here again with his future sibling. So… at the ripe old age of 4 months, we officially inducted Ethan into our little…
I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair. I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see. For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in…
So… that happened… Hard for me to believe that I started this blog after Ariel and I decided we were ready to start a family, but wanted to have one last big adventure before we did. Now it is six years to the day later, and all the things that I was pondering as we finished planning our New Zealand trip are finally coming to fruition. I’ll never forget standing on top of Mount Sunday (the Lord of the Rings…
This is Ariel, Liran’s wife, with another guest post covering our brief and parents-only babymoon to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. WHY MONTREAL: We had two childfree nights coming from the NY/NJ area. At first I looked into options that we could drive to, but post-COVID, if it’s within 3 hours drive of central NJ, chances are, we’ve seen it. Instead we looked at destinations we could fly to relatively quickly. And given that I was in my third trimester of pregnancy,…
One thing I haven’t talked about much in previous posts, is the fact that I try to keep kosher as much as possible. At home in NJ, this isn’t a big deal. But when traveling, this can be a real challenge, so I basically draw the line at chicken and meat. Most fish is kosher, and because there is no kosher slaughter for fish, that’s a pretty decent cheat code if like me, you aren’t totally by the letter of…
Hard to believe I’m writing this over 5 months after we got back from our epic Hawaii trip… AND an even more epic (although much shorter) adventures in Iceland, but it’s been a really packed few months for us here. Thinking back on our time in Hawaii, there’s a part of me that really really wishes we had been able to go to the Big Island. Without a trip to Maona Kea and Maona Loa, I can’t really give a…
Something I was not expecting about visiting Iceland was just how European it would be. This might seem obvious, since it’s similar culturally to Norway, Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries. But I’ve never actually been to any of those places, even though I’ve been to much of Europe. And Iceland is… you know… an island… kind of in the middle of nowhere, with wide stretches that are nearly uninhabited and extremely wild. Not the typical European experience!…
Do you know where Mount Doom is? You probably don’t. In the books Mount Doom is obviously in Mordor, which is – thankfully – not a real place. In the films, Mount Doom is an amalgamation of Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Ruapehu in New Zealand. Ariel and I actually got to visit the film location during our somewhat ill-fated Tongariro Alpine Crossing adventure way way back in 2017. Little did we know at the time, but while this location was…