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…
In addition to our literal “adventures are not all pony rides in May-sunshine” experiences on this trip in which we dealt with incessant rain, we had another rather disappointing component of our trip. That was that our car, a Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross, was… pretty terrible! While it wasn’t as literally underivable as the Tezzari Zero Ariel and I dealt with in Bermuda a few years ago, this “SUV” was definitely below average. But it was really the (lack of) service…
Editor’s Note: This is part 2 of a short series of posts by Ariel on our dining experiences in Iceland. For Part 1, covering the Reykjavik and Snæfellsnes Peninsula area click here! Laugarvatn We stayed right outside of the town of Laugarvatn on our third night, and down the road from where we stayed was the Efstidalur farm, which includes hotel accommodations and a casual restaurant and ice cream shop. Dinner was only OK here – definitely more meat options….
Editor’s Note: After being my adventure partner since the inception of this blog (and well before!) my amazing wife Ariel decide to do her own post about some of our dining experiences in Iceland, specifically from the perspective of finding food that would work for our rather picky eater of a son, Jacob. Here’s hoping she’s inspired to contribute more posts like this in the future! Just note, we’re not really your typical food bloggers, so we didn’t take a…