Smart Travel for Travelers Over 50

Hi. We're Tom and Kris

We're former newspaper and magazine publishers who shed
our last publication, our house, and most of our possessions
and set out on a journey to see the world.
Join us.
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Let us help you travel more

Tom and Kris at Santiago de Compostela
We've been traveling almost non-stop for 16 years. Let us share our knowledge with you.

Our goal is simple: we want to help you travel more and better for less money.

Our blog and newsletter are focused on exactly that: how you can get where you want to go as easily as possible, and how can you have the richest experience once you're there. It's our pleasure to offer personalized travel advice, helping our readers sort through travel decisions and providing our best, tried and true travel tips.

We've been sharing our experience since we started traveling full time in 2010.

You can find out more about us here >>>

Top Articles

  • Our 50 Best Tips — Our experience distilled into 50 practical tips that will save you time, money, and headaches.
  • Packing Light — Our complete carry-on packing system.
  • Travel Resources — The booking sites, apps, tools, and services we personally use.
  • Travel Gear — The tested gadgets that actually earn their place in your bag.
  • Mobile Apps — The apps we use for navigation, translation, booking, and more.
  • Travel Quotes — The lines that have stuck with us — from fellow wanderers who said it so well.
  • Guide to Spain — Our comprehensive guide to traveling in Spain, from people who lived there.
  • Guide to Italy — Our comprehensive guide to traveling in Italy.
  • The Camino de Santiago — Our comprehensive guide to the Camino.

Our Latest Blog Posts

The Two Most Important Things About Chiang Mai

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The Two Most Important Things About Chiang Mai

For those who have never had a Thai massage, you're in for something different. In contrast to the soothing, along-the-line-of-the-muscle Swedish style prevalent in the US, the Thais believe that they should rub hard across the grain of the muscle. This has the effect of stretching your connective tissues, such as tendons and ligaments, in directions they've probably never been in before. Honestly, it hurts. But, after it's over, you'll ask yourself why the hell haven't I been doing this all my life?

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Cruising the Bosphorus

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Cruising the Bosphorus

It may be a bit of an oversimplification, but you could probably say that Istanbul exists because of the Bosphorus. It was the first thing I wanted to see when we got there. We dropped our bags at the Empress Zoe hotel, and headed right out. We were only a few blocks away, and so our first impressions of Istanbul were those of the strong current flowing from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, the ships lined up waiting for their pilots to take them through the strait, and the lines of fishermen with their lines in dark water.

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A Little Treasure of Madrid, the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales

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A Little Treasure of Madrid, the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales

When Kris and I lived in Madrid thirty-two years ago we worked at a language school that was about eight blocks from our apartment. One of the routes we often took to work took us past a nondescript building with two large oak doors and a small sign beside one of them which identified it as a convent. (Here's the Google map.)

The same sign offered tours during limited hours, but in all the time we lived here, and in our many subsequent visits to Madrid, we never got around to seeing what was inside the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales. We remedied that this time.

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Fantastic Cappadocia, Turkey

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Fantastic Cappadocia, Turkey

Cappadocia, In a word: fantastic. In the literal sense. It's a fantasy land, both in terms of history and landscape. The region is a network of small towns that have one thing in common: the weird geology of the region lent itself over the ages to people digging caves to live in. And so they did.

And, if you look at a map, and know a little of the history of the Christian church, you'll see that this area also lent itself to becoming a true cradle for the infant church–a cradle which sheltered Christians in these caves for up to fifteen centuries.

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The Ruins of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis

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The Ruins of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis

I posted about Rome six days ago, and at the time promised to go on endlessly about our subsequent visits to the sites that were destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 AD, or as the secularists say, 79 CE. Since I'm a Latin guy though, I'm sticking with AD.

So, here goes. First there was a train ride from Rome to Naples, then a change for Pompeii. We had decided to stay in Pompeii, instead of Naples, for a couple of reasons. Number one is that Naples is pretty much of a shit hole, and I can't remember the second one.

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