Happy Holidays from South Africa!

We are sitting at our hotel at the Johannesburg airport, about to meet up with the Johnston family and head out for safari, Christmas and New Years. We apologize for the lack of recent posts, but beleive it or not (likely not...), we actually have written posts for our time in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Namibia and Victoria Falls! However, our new excuse is that we have had pretty spotty internet access over the last two weeks and haven't been able to upload the 100 or so pictures we'd ultimately like to post. So bear with us and expect a flurry of posts early in 2015 when we will be spending about 3 weeks in Cape Town (assuming the wifi works at our AirBnB apartment, of course!). In the meantime, we've managed to post a few pictures here and there on Instagram, where you can find us at "alexisdjohnston" and "miguelitolanger." Happy holidays and happy new year!

Love,
Alexis and Mike

How they do Christmas trees in Bali:

And Scout celebrating her first Chanukah (thanks to Scott Langer for the photos!):

Needless to say, her stufffed dreidels didn't last long.

Cambodia...aka 40+ Pictures of the Angkor Temples

Even at the early stages of our trip, we both knew that this was going to be one of the harder posts to write. The Angkor temples - outisde of the northern Cambodian city of Siem Reap - are the most impressive collection of ruins we've seen to date (and are also unlikely to be surpassed). The scale is impossible to describe or capture on camera, but as always, we'll do our best. Oh, and we also spent a few days in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, which is a fantastic city in its own right.

But before we get there, the approaching holiday season has been a bit strange for us. When we run into scenes like this at the Bangkok airport...

Thailand Beaches

Other than food, Thailand is probably best known for its beaches, so we had no choice but to check out a few! We focused our time on three beaches on the Andaman Sea: Krabi, Koh Lanta and Phuket.

From Chiang Mai, we flew to the resort town of Krabi. Our hotel was beautiful, so we were pretty content to relax by the pool and beach during the day.

Chiang Mai

Before heading down to Thailand's famous beaches, we spent a few days in Chiang Mai. The most popular destination in northern Thailand, Chiang Mai is known for its temples, elephants, and (of course) food.

Beyond these Chaing Mai "basics," our first night in Chiang Mai coincided with the annual Lantern Festival, Yi Peng. We were extremely lucky in the timing of our visit, as the exact date of the festival isn't announced until just a few weeks in advance.

The main event is the release of thousands of lighted lanterns into the sky while making a wish. The resulting scene is really spectacular as the lanterns light up the sky for miles. Photos don't really do it justice, but we'll at least give it a try.

Laos

After a long hiatus...it's a two post day, so don't miss Northern Vietnam below as well!

Landlocked, and not as popular with tourists, Laos has a significantly more laid back vibe than the rest of SE Asia. We spent our time in 3 cities - Vientiane (the real capital), Vang Vieng (the tubing capital), and Luang Prabang (the tourist capital).

We travelled between these cities by bus...our first true SE Asian bus experience (the long delay was intentional). Though the distances aren't far, the road conditions make for a long journey. We will spare you the details, but while the scenery is beautiful, the terrain is mountainous and the roads are extremely windy and in poor condition. Let's just say we considered ourselves lucky to be in the fewer than 50% of passengers who made the trip without using vomit bags.

The roads:

Northern Vietnam

Our last stops in Vietnam were in the north, where we spent two days in the capital, Hanoi, sandwiched around a two day trip to Halong Bay.

Hanoi, while similar in size and pace to Ho Chi Minh City, seemed somewhat less "western-ized," i.e., we didn't see McDonalds or any other major chain stores or restaurants. Upon our arrival, we were treated to the most impressive honeymoon display to date in our hotel room.

Suppose they don't call it the "Hanoi Charming Hotel 2" for nothing.

Central Vietnam

This post is a tricky one. We have almost 450 pictures from the two cities we visited (Hue and Hoi An) and as we flipped through them, we realized that some folks might like them and others may find them boring. So, we decided to just post a ton of them (many without specific captions or descriptions) and you can make up your own mind!

Hue (pronounced "Hu-way", as we learned, much to our embarrassment), was the old imperial capital of Vietnam. As such, there are many ruins and tombs throughout the area.

Phu Quoc Island, Vietnam

We arrived in SE Asia with virtually no plans, so when we started reading about Phu Quoc - a small island being touted as Vietnam's next big thing - we figured we would adopt the Vietnamese mindset, "why not?"

Located off the southwest coast of Vietnam, and just a 45 min flight from Ho Chi Minh City, the island is quite quaint with abundant, beautiful beaches that are still relatively untouched. However, this is likely to change in the near future, as there is a staggering amount of construction on the island (and as we would soon discover, in many of the coastal Vietnamese towns as well). Perhaps the best indicator of things to come is the brand-new airport that just opened in anticipation of increasing tourism over the coming years.

Ho Chi Minh City

Luckily, Singapore eased us back into city life, because we were thrown into SE Asia city-living head first in Ho Chi Minh City.

The city is growing quickly and is literally buzzing as a result of the millions (yes, millions) of motorbikes on the road.

Singapore

Fully rested and sick of ice cream (nah, who are we kidding?!), we eased into the Asian leg of our trip with three days in Singapore - city shots are back!

Maldives

You'll likely notice that we are officially way out of order now. To prevent ourselves from falling further behind, we decided to skip ahead to the (almost) present in an attempt to update more frequently. But don't worry, we'll be sure to fill-in the rest of the European cities at some point. As the chronology gets more and more jumbled going forward, if you're looking at the desktop version of the site, you should be able to click on a European city on the map and it should take you to that post. So stay tuned for posts on Oktoberfest, Alexis's drunkest night to date (you'll be surprised where it happens!) and the dramatic conclusion to Mike's European root canal saga.

Which brings us to the Maldives! We called this week of our trip our official "honeymoon," in part to justify how expensive and out of the way it is, but it ended up being worth every penny.

Riga, Latvia

After having a great time in Tallinn, we were eager to move onto our second Baltic country, Latvia. The excitement was based not only on seeing a new city, but also on our second guest appearance: Sadia!

Insert shameless plug: come visit us!

Tallinn, Estonia

Double post day! You knew it was coming at some point. And yet, as we sit here in Bratislava, we're still 4 cities behind (Riga, Vilnius, Krakow and Budapest). So, once we leave Europe, we are going to try to mix things up a bit and attempt shorter, more frequent posts. Understood that "try" is the operative word here, but we promise we will try, so don't give up on us yet! With that, onto the next phase of our journey...

Although the ferry ride from Helsinki to Tallinn was a short one, it represented a meaningful change, as we left Scandinavia and headed into the former Soviet republics along the Baltic Sea. The countries are a lot smaller and the Russian influences are far more obvious. Oh, and everything is significantly cheaper!

The smile on Alexis's face is from noticing that the prices of food and alcohol - on the ferry no less - were less than half as much as they were in Finland.

The Arctic Circle - Our First Audible of the Trip

Our original plan was to take a quick trip to St. Petersburg, taking advantage of the ability to spend 72 hours in Russia visa-free if coming via overnight ferry from Helsinki. However, as Russia/US relations became more and more strained by the day, we decided that going there without a visa might be more trouble than it was worth and we'd save St. Petersburg for our epic Russia/Ukraine trip (estimated date: 2044). Instead, we made a last minute decision to head up to northern Finland to try to see the Northern Lights.

We took the overnight train from Helsinki to Rovaniemi, a town right on the Arctic Circle, to test our luck. Mike was very impressed with the train.

Alexis, not so much.

Helsinki

Finland - the final stop on our Scandinavian tour!

The visit started off great, as our luck with honeymoon upgrades continued. We stayed in THE Maria Kamp suite in the very fancy Kamp Hotel and had a nice bottle of champagne waiting for us upon arrival - thanks Starwood! All those nights in Hartford are starting to pay off...

Quick Update

As you may or may not have noticed, we did a little work updating the layout and technical aspects of the blog. The format is a little different (and promise we will add some color when we have a chance!) and hopefully the comments should now work (we had heard some people were unable to comment). You should now be able to log in with your Google account and post. Who's going to be the guinea pig?? Please let us know if you're having any technical problems with the new format so that we can try to fix them. And another post on Helsinki to come later today!

Stockholm

Our trip from Norway to Sweden was incredibly easy, but interesting nevertheless. It required a boat, two buses, a plane and a train to get from the Barn (think it deserves a proper noun from here on out) to our hotel in Stockholm. And a trip to a Norwegian dentist so that Mike could get a root canal. But we made it to Sweden, the next country on our tour of Scandinavia.

As we sat down to write this post, we realized we didn't take many pictures here, but will do our best, starting with a nice picture of the city.

Ypso Island (Norway)

So back to the the landscapes and lack of pictures together - but this time we have an excuse! We spent our time in Norway in a renovated barn on a private island (called Ypso) about an hour north of Bergen. There are no cars on the island and it's only accessible by boat. The only full-time inhabitants are the two owners of the barn, a handful of cows and a lot of wild sheep.

(from Google Maps)

Copenhagen

On to country #2...Denmark, and specifically, Copenhagen.

Dublin!

Well, since we have started the trend of disclaimers, here we go. Given our "constant" wardrobe, you may think we've been incredibly productive and seen Ireland in one day...unfortunately that is not the case. Ireland began a cold snap before we arrived and given our highly limited selection of warm clothes among our highly limited selection of clothes, we are on an extremely tight rotation. Please see below - all of Alexis's clothes, with Scout included for scale.

Spoiler alert - things have not changed much in Copenhagen.

Western Ireland

Two quick things before the pictures. First, sorry for the delay in writing our first "real" post. We've been running around western Ireland for the last 5 days and have had barely enough time to find the next night's accomodations, let alone figure out how to transfer photos from our camera to our tablet. And second, you'll notice that with the exception of one lousy selfie, we have no pictures together. We will work on that.

So. Western Ireland! Great flight from Philly to Shannon.

Introduction

First, while we can't make any promises, we hope that none of our posts over the coming months will be longer than this one. Fingers crossed, our pictures will speak for themselves...assuming we figure out how to use our brand new, fancy camera. Otherwise, get ready for a mix of blurry landscapes and iPhone selfies. Or worse...

The Wedding

July 26th, 2014
Hyannisport, MA

Step One...

...move stuff from NYC to Boston. Yup, that's 27 feet of truck. And a $34 toll on the GW bridge.