In spite of the fact that the temperatures are still high and the days long, reality is beginning to slap us in the face as we look at the calendar and see that our longest summer ever is nearly over. Kids are going back to school soon (including Breeanne and myself), and the year’s best […]
Bree: With a week on US soil now under our belts, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our suburban life. We’ve talked a lot about the things we love, the things we’ve missed, and the things we aren’t quite so sure about. We certainly missed our families and our friends and we try […]
Although a lifetime of waterskiing has been a huge part of my family’s togetherness, we fell in love with Bear Lake only a few years ago. We’re in love with its beautiful blue hue, the glassy water, and the relatively short drive from home. So, after having been back in the states for only a […]
Bree: I dreamed all night about being lost in a series of German villages with no end in sight. We just couldn’t seem to escape. But then, I woke up in our enormous hotel bed and realized that instead, the end had truly arrived. Feeling almost as nervous about returning home as I had about […]
The rain was still doing its thing when we woke up, so for the last time, we packed up a wet tent and shoved it in the car along with all of our gear, still in various degrees of being airplane ready. We had a lot of driving to accomplish today and a lot of […]
Loud thunderstorms kept us up well into the night last night and rain was still falling on the fly when we woke up this morning. We loaded everything into the tent with a soft rain still falling, meaning that everything stayed pretty wet and muddy. Then, we headed out toward Lake Bodensee to see what […]
Bree: Early on, when we began planning this trip, we had a running list of places we thought we might like to visit. It was a scramble of all kinds of places we had dreamed of since we were children, heard about from loved ones, seen in books or on the web. Ben had seen […]
After yesterday’s incredible hike through the Berner Oberland, we were convinced to stick around and do some more hiking today. Unfortunately, we’d been told by more than one person to expect lots of rain in the morning, so we had gone to bed simply hoping for the best because the peaks here simply aren’t visible […]
A surprisingly chilly night in Zermatt meant that I was able to break out my orange jacket for the first time since our free camp in the field of stinging nettle clear back in Tuscany. As we milled about the campground last night, everybody was dressed in full winter gear – long pants and big, […]
Today we had a new adventure to conquer- to find the Europcar location in Lecco. For some reason the rental car locations over here tend to move often, be difficult to find, and sometimes be poorly marked, so we weren’t exactly sure how tracking down our rental car reservation was going to work out. We […]
As seems to be our fate as of late, we woke up last night to rain. The rain continued to pour well into the morning, once again thwarting our plan to leave early and be off of the road before the heavy, damp Italian heat set in. Luckily we had some good books to listen […]
We were up bright and early again today for another 85 kilometer day of cycling, this time mostly downhill to the top of Lake Como. We had only two kilometers of uphill riding and a grocery stop to complete before we summitted Aprica Pass and headed down the other side. Ben: As we rode through […]