People always talk about the luck of the Irish and I think the luckiest thing of all is that they get to live in Ireland. Our family traveled to Ireland over Easter 2022 and got to see many of the country’s highlights. We started in Wales and took the ~two-hour ferry from Holyhead, Wales over to Dublin. After renting a car, we headed south and spent the first...
We visited Australia (pre-Covid!) and had the most wonderful time that we can’t wait to get back. Sydney is an amazing city but Australia is truly unique and well-worth the long flight to get there! In fact, the long flight was precisely WHY we chose to visit Australia when we did. We found the very longest route possible for us to fly Etihad’s First...
If you have points but don’t know how to use them best, we’re here to help. This service starts at $150 per person. During personal travel, our family tries our best to incorporate paying for at least a portion of our trip with airline miles + points. We’ve flown First Class on many airlines including Thai Airways, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Korean...
On our way to Alsace, France to see the Christmas markets in 2018, we spent a few nights in Zürich. Zürich is well-known for finance, luxurious lifestyles, and fancy chocolates. We visited just before Christmas, so it was fun to explore Zürich’s Christmas markets and
We recently traveled to Mexico’s second largest city (behind its capital, Mexico City): Guadalajara. As expected, it was not built around tourism but rather around everyday life, which was a welcome and refreshing feel for us. The city is huge and bustling with life, but each neighborhood has a slightly different feel. We loved walking around the historical...
In 2018, we booked a last-minute long weekend vacation to France and picked La Rochelle and neighboring island, Ile de Ré, as our destination. Jeffrey and I both are descended from French Huguenots (protestants who fled Catholic France in the 16th & 17th centuries) – and both of us had family members who landed in Charleston many generations ago (where...
We spent about 10 days exploring the Southeast Asian country of Cambodia in early 2019 – with our seven-month-old daughter. She loved the windblown feel of the backseat of a tuk-tuk and, like all new parents, we were thrilled that everyone loved our pale, chubby baby. But, really: Cambodia is a country full of surprises. Its history, particularly its pretty...
In 2011, we traveled to the other side of the world for our first taste of Southeast Asia. We spent two weeks exploring Bangkok and the coast of Thailand and we were hooked. We fell in love with Bangkok (and haven’t lost the starry-eyed feeling yet, all these years later). The energy, the food, the people… it’s unlike anything we’d seen before...
With a name like McCown, it may or may not be pretty obvious that I have some Scottish heritage. Scotland feels a bit like coming home to me – except it’s a little chillier than my home of South Carolina. I’ve had the good fortune to visit the lands where my ancestors once lived twice now, even visiting the small, picturesque village on the banks of...
Medellín, Colombia has taught us a few valuable lessons about the world. Jeffrey and I were born in the late 80s, when Medellín was truly the most dangerous city in the world. And, here we are not much later, walking its streets with our babies in tow. Something that traveling to new places continues to teach us is that nothing stays the same in this life. And what a...