I caught the gist of the phrase based on what I was hearing on the news, but I have to admit I still went to everyone’s back-up source and Googled the term.

Put me on a train and you can pretty much color me happy.  I’m still waiting for someone to build railroad tracks across the Atlantic Ocean and I’d never fly again.  Love trains.  Hate planes.  It’s that simple.

I’m beginning to understand why people return to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago more than once.  When we reached Santiago, the end of our journey, I was beyond exhausted and thought to myself, okay, that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Jump to the PDF:  Camino de Santiago FAQ

To tour or not to tour?  It’s the question we find ourselves asking more and more often as we travel.  Maybe it’s because we have officially retired and are a bit more selective as to how we spend our money, or maybe it’s because we’ve seen a few too many museums and castles.  Whatever the reason, we are more discriminating these days.

As I put fingers to keyboard to begin writing about our three weeks in Iran, I want to rewind for just a bit to write a few words about traveling in today’s world.

It’s an odd phenomenon.  When you travel for a length of time your life changes, you learn to stay the course but it’s a very different course than your home course.  Moving from one place to the next becomes the task at hand.  What to do, where to go, where to stay, booking reservations, catching the bus, the train, the plane and so on, those are the decisions that guide your days.

Ten days in Aix en Provence; the south of France.  Even the name, Provence, sounds soothing to the soul. Pretty much the perfect final destination to wrap up this 3-month, 6 countries incredible journey we’ve been on.  I adore France and I’ve been known to say I could live in France if it weren’t for the smoking.

By the time we left Prague neither one of us was back up to speed and I was still sporting a hacking bit of a cough, but we carried forward.  It was onward to Bavaria!

Arbeit Macht Frei

Labor Brings Liberty

These are the words emblazoned over the entrance gate to Dachau Concentration Camp – the model for all camps.

With only two days left in Prague it was a choice between Sunday or Monday as to which day we would take a day trip to Kutna Hora.  We decided Sunday was the better choice giving us a just in case day if we didn’t make it.