travel story

New Zealand: Wellington to Hokitika

/ lifeafter9to5 / 1 Comment

IMG_2947

When we first started planning the trip, we decided to not book anything in advance in order to allow ourselves some flexibility.  It worked out for the most part, and we were able to change our itinerary as we went along.  Our determination to go with the flow was really tested on this leg of the trip where everything was turned topsy turvy and we had to scramble to make lots of last-minute changes.  Luckily or unluckily (depending on how you look at it) we are no strangers to dealing with problems that arise while traveling. 

Continue reading →

Advertisement

All Packed Up and No Where to Go

/ lifeafter9to5 / 4 Comments

IMG_20141126_104142376_HDR

If you’ve been following our blog for awhile, you may have noticed a trend.  There is a running  joke amongst our friends that we are a travel jinx. Basically, whereever we go, things tend to go sideways. For our flight to Rio, we were all packed and ready to go;  we got to the airport, checked in our bags, and were ready to hit the beaches of Brazil. While we were in the lounge having a drink, Fausto’s phone started buzzing wildly. It was from American Airlines… which is never a good thing. Turns out our flight was cancelled and rescheduled for the next day. Even though there are other empty flights going to Brazil tonight, we are stuck here because they can not pull our luggage once it’s checked in.  Apparently that’s the new policy. Continue reading →

Stuck in Africa…Almost

/ lifeafter9to5 / Leave a comment

700-cancelled-flights-board

[photo credit: www.skyscanner.com]

When you travel there is always the possibility of delays and flight cancellations.  That’s part of the “experience”.  Somehow, it seems to happen to us quite a bit. On our last night in Stone Town as we were weaving our way through the markets, Fausto got an alert that our 5:45 am flight on Kenya Airways was cancelled. We had 2 tight connections to get home, so a cancelled flight would mean that we’d miss all of our other flights; and that was no good since we both had to be back at work Tuesday morning.  What was a great vacation turned into a bit of a nightmare as we scrambled to find a way home. Continue reading →

Photo of the Week: Souk

/ lifeafter9to5 / 1 Comment

IMG_2527Marrakech, Morocco

This picture was taken inside the biggest souk in Marrakech, off of Jemaa el Fna square.  The market is a massive labyrinth with many crisscrossing walkways, each filled with stalls selling everything from leather goods, to rugs, to spices, to almost anything you can think of.

I picked this picture because the other day we met up with some friends for brunch and got to reminiscing about our ‘super duper fun’ trip to Morocco. Did you picked up on my sarcasm there with the air quotes and the italic fonts?  Seriously though, it was a memorable trip, but for all the wrong reasons. Basically Murphy’s Law was at play, where anything that could go wrong, went wrong for us. The weather was awful the whole time with continuous rain and freezing temperatures…in Morocco! We almost got stranded in the Atlas mountains because of a freak snow storm…in Morocco! We had to cancel part of our trip because we couldn’t drive over the mountain.  Then to top it all off, we almost got carbon monoxide poisoning in one of our hotels.

The sad part was, we’d all heard so many great things about Morocco and could not wait to go on this two week long trip! Our experience did not live up to the expectation and we pretty much had cabin fever after a week and could not wait to return home. One day I would want to go back to trek into the Sahara desert and camp overnight under the stars; something we weren’t able to do. Hopefully it’ll erase all the bad memories from the first trip.

Every Monday of each week, I’ll share a photo with you from my adventures around the world and at home.  Most of my photos have little or no post processing.  If you would like to see more, please click the ‘Follow’ button.