Buckle up, this is a long one. Clocking in at over 14 days total and our longest trip yet, I planned and re-planned for six whole months between booking the plane tickets and finally leaving on September 3rd. I've loved sushi since I was a kid, and most of my family's holidays end up at hibachi restaurants so I salivated over all the different foods we'd get to try over the two week trip. I didn't know until about a month before that while Brendan and I travel well together, we travel for very different reasons. I go where my stomach leads, and he's more interested in the sights and the actual places we're going. It's a nice balance.
Read MoreAh, Italia. We booked flights in May 2018 for an October getaway, and dreams of sipping wine and fresh pasta danced around our heads for the next six months. I went in to my typical research frenzy, knowing the only constraints were starting in Milan and ending in Rome ten days later. The internet had plenty of advice, with Cinque Terre and the Amalfi Coast topping most of the must-see lists.
I really wanted to fit Venice in, since The Thief Lord was one of my favorite books as a kid (I had a thing for stories where kids lived in atypical places like abandoned theaters or boxcars) but at the same time, we wanted to spend less time on the road than we had in Ireland and try to spend two nights in every place. We also decided early on that we wouldn't rent a car this time, opting instead to take trains or buses anywhere we wanted to go…
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