Journal

From the road, the desk, and the planning notebook.

Destination guides, trip reports, and the slow accumulation of what makes a trip actually work.

Featured · Trip Planning

Reine in the rain, and the morning Norway lost its king

We were standing there with our rain jackets over our arms, about to walk off the ship into Reine. You could feel it move through the whole ship. The crew had been worried about him since he went into the hospital, and now they were in s...

Trip Planning

Åndalsnes and the Romsdalsgondolen, three hours on top of a mountain

We woke up outside Åndalsnes with no plan and a very large gondola sitting in front of the window, which is either a problem or an invitation depending on how you travel. MS Midnatsol came alongside at 9 in the morning. We had not booked...

Trip Planning

First day aboard MS Midnatsol on the Hurtigruten Svalbard Line

We got to the terminal at 10:30 in the morning, and it took about 45 minutes to get through check in, and then there was coffee and pastries and a wait for our turn at the safety briefing video, which is not the glamorous part of a cruis...

Trip Planning

Walking the other way in Bergen

Bergen has a row of wooden houses on the harbor that everyone photographs, and we had already photographed them, so on our second morning we finished breakfast and turned the other direction along the water with no plan beyond that. That...

Trip Planning

What Bergen sounded like on my first night in Norway

# What Bergen sounded like on my first night in Norway There was a poster of the Lofoten Islands on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager, red houses standing on stilts over dark green water, and I have been carrying Norway around with m...

Trip Planning

What I wish I'd known before our first trip to Iceland

What I remember most clearly is a bearded, tattooed, viking-looking man in a business suit, riding a scooter through downtown Reykjavik. He looked like he could have stepped out of a longboat in 900 AD, and he was checking his watch on h...

Trip Planning

Why Slovenia belongs on your list, even if you've never heard of it

Most Americans I know can't place Slovenia on a map, and that was true for me too, right up until I started researching what was near Croatia. We had loved our small-ship cruise along the Croatian coast so much that I was already thinkin...

Trip Planning

The case for adding days to your cruise

The decision that changed how I plan every trip to Europe was simple. I was on a small yacht-style ship along the Croatian coast, my first cruise, and I started looking at flights. The leg from Croatia to Zurich was about $50. The flight...

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