This trip has been a dream of my mother and I for nearly 25+ years, ever since we started going to Celtic Festivals to celebrate our heritage at Hunter Mt. in upstate NY. We loved watching the Highland games and listening to the bagpipes, a beloved instrument to us both. We would often daydream about a trip one day to visit, but it just never came to fruition until now. I was lucky enough to score some ridiculously cheap tickets to Glasgow from Newark with Iceland Air ($340) and used airline miles to make it free, my favorite and often used method of travel. The great part of booking with Iceland air is they include a 1-7 day stopover in Reykjavik, adding an incredible mini vacation inside an already amazing trip. So off we went. I ... read more

We flew from Bali to Labuan Bajo, the closest airport to Komodo, an easy 1 hour 15 min flight. We met with our dive shop Scuba Junkies there and waited for the once a day boat ride to their resort. We were really happy we weren't staying in this town as it had nothing attractive about it whatsoever except as a hopping point for Komodo National Park. Scuba Junkies has one of the closest resorts right outside of Komodo so we could access some of the more remote dive sites easily every day. The accommodations were really basic consisting of bamboo thatched roof huts with a mattress on the floor, resembling more traditional housing than we've been staying in but perfect for a four days where you literally sleep, dive, eat and repeat ($469 pp incl. ... read more

We arrived in the island province of Bali and felt like we had arrived in an entirely different country, which it actually was up until 1906 when it was invaded by the Dutch. Hindu culture and design is apparent and prolific everywhere and makes everything a bit more beautiful and exotic. Hindus comprise about 90% of the population here, an extreme departure from the predominantly Muslim populations elsewhere in Indonesia. There are shrines and statutes of deities such as Vishnu, Garuda or Ganesh in front of every structure and seemed as though there were small temples on every block. Every day we watched the Balinese women engage in daily offerings to the Gods. Offerings are generally made twice daily, in the morning and late afternoon, by women in every household and business in multiple locations. The ... read more

I booked our return flight home with a 23 hour layover in London, as neither of us had been there previously and what better way to see it than by a "free" long layover. It was surely a whirlwind tour, but we are used to that. As Dennis likes to say our trips are just "Go Go Go" with little time for any rest or relaxation, except what we manage to get riding a bus, train, plane etc. In my opinion we do enough of resting on our weekends at home so when I'm on vacation I want to pack in as much as I can and see everything possible before it's over. We arrived in London late afternoon, after more delays, checked into the Curzon Hotel ($53) in Kensington which provided us easy and quick ... read more

We arrived in the morning to Istanbul after a brief 1 1/2hr flight from Athens. We easily took the train from the airport into the main tourist area of Sultanahmet where we walked to Hotel Basileus ($45). The hotel was lovely and the staff incredibly helpful and friendly, and the surrounding neighborhood was a beautiful 17th century style seaport that looked more like New Bedford, Massachusetts than Turkey. We already wished we had more time to spend in this city that has the perfect blend of East meets West. We wandered the serpentine medieval streets of this former Ottoman and Byzantine capital and viewed the Aya Sofya and the Blue Mosque from the hippodrome sandwiched in between them, where there now is a large Egyptian obelisk and Greek column which we recognized as pilfered from Egypt ... read more